


Reckless Dark Desires

by tfm



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Blood and Violence, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Gaslighting, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation, Non-Consensual Blood Drinking, Sexual Content, Sort Of, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:20:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 26
Words: 62,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25183168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfm/pseuds/tfm
Summary: The Cobalt Soul Institute for the Control of Supernatural Creatures (or, the Soul, for short) generally has a pretty good handle on Zadash’s vampire problem. At least, that is, until a new vampire den pops up, one that’s a little more…extraplanar than anticipated. As an Expositor of the Cobalt Soul, Beauregard spends her days (and her afternoons, and her nights) hunting down some of the more problematic creatures. What she uncovers will change her life, and everything that she thought was important in her world.Or, Beau is a vampire-hunter, and Yasha is a vampire, and they find a ~connection~.Ft. Beau's unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & The Mighty Nein, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Dairon & Beauregard Lionett, Mollymauk Tealeaf & Yasha
Comments: 284
Kudos: 415





	1. Clever got me this far

I – Clever got me this far

Beau and Caleb crouched in the dark alleyway, waiting for the vampires to show up.

‘You didn’t have to come, you know,’ Beau told him. She told him every single time they went out, because every single time, he raised a fuss about having to step away from his research.

‘Coming out is the only way I get paid,’ Caleb responded, brusquely. Beau decided not to comment on the pun.

Caleb was wearing his old patchwork coat, pockets filled with garlic, and holy water, and all manner of protective measures against supernatural creatures. It was a much more practical outfit than Beau’s tank top and ripped jeans, with an old flannelette shirt thrown over top for good measure. Not her usual fair, but for some strange reason, it was frowned upon to wear a crop top and sweatpants to a vampire hunt.

Go figure.

Caleb wasn’t wrong. Beau was technically on (a very small) salary with the Cobalt Soul, but all the rest of them worked on something of a per diem. Or, more accurately, per death.

They received a monthly stipend from the Soul, which could just about cover the cost of stakes and silver bullets, but apart from that, if they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid.

Fjord, and Caleb, and…technically Veth as well, were all “consultants.” At least, that was the terminology Beau used on her monthly expense report. In reality, they were more like partners, and if they’d been doing it for the money, they would have been very disappointed.

Caleb, of course, did it for the library access. He had his own research that he was doing, completely unrelated to vampires or werewolves or zombie. From the brief glance that Beau had gotten the last time they’d gone to the library together, it had something to do with time magic.

Veth did it because Caleb did it. Veth and her husband ran a pretty successful alchemy business, selling potions that did all sorts of exciting things. It had taken her a year to make, but Beau had successfully used one of Veth’s potions to successfully turn a rabid werewolf into a kitten. Veth also made the potions that stopped Beau from turning into a zombie, so it was pretty important that she stick around. Not that the strain that Beau had been infected with had been particularly strong. Every now and then, she got a really strong craving for brains, despite having never even come close to eating a brain, let alone a human brain.

Fjord…well, Fjord was a little closer to the chest with his reasons for helping. He had been instrumental in helping bring down a gang of murderous selkies, and was second to none on the knowledge of mysterious underwater threats, but he did often go off on his own secret missions, refusing to tell anyone where he was going, or what he was doing.

All in all, it was a reasonably well-rounded crew. They brought down the monsters that terrorized the citizens of Zadash, and were reasonably well-compensated for it. A few times a year, Beau had to go to some stupid “this is how we don’t let ourselves become the monsters” meeting, the only upside to which was the free food that they put out. Fjord always distracted people while Beau and Veth stuffed their pockets with bacon-wrapped shrimp.

‘You telling me you’re only here because they pay you?’ Beau ribbed gently. Their friendship had had a rough start, almost coming to blows in the midst of an operation six months previously. They had very vehemently disagreed on the correct way to deal with a dragon-woman that had been acting suspiciously.

‘ _Nein_ ,’ Caleb admitted. ‘I am also here because Dairon did not want you getting attacked by vampires again.’

‘The whole job is getting attacked by vampires,’ Beau muttered, but she understood his point. She did have a habit of getting in over her head and pissing off things that she shouldn’t. Not that Caleb was any better, Mister “On the run from the Cerberus Assembly.” The hilarious thing was, though, Beau was technically immune to the weird charms of vampires, because, Veth’s potion notwithstanding, the virus meant she was already undead. Every couple of weeks, the Cobalt Soul’s doctors dragged her down to the lab to run tests and figure out if there was a way to replicate the immunity without turning all of their hunters into zombies. The only reason that Beau tolerated was because the Doctor than ran most of the tests was very cute (and had thus far rebuffed Beau’s very overt come-ons twice).

They had been tracking this particular den of vamps for almost a month. Late nights of reconnaissance figuring out who was in charge, and just how many there were in the den. There was no point in taking out isolated members of the dens because it meant that the rest of them would just pack up and go somewhere else. When the Cobalt Soul cleaned house, they liked to do it properly. “Leave No Trace” was the mantra that Dairon kept hammering into her.

Corruption could spread from the smallest seed.

Unfortunately, that meant a lot of late nights in dark alleyways, skulking in shadow, and taking notes on numbers and movements. Beau had gotten very good at not being seen, but was somehow utterly outclassed by Veth, who had once spent almost a week in the attic of a werewolf house without them realizing anything was amiss. Doubly impressive, given how easily werewolves could pick up a scent.

‘They are late,’ Caleb whispered.

Beau turned to look at him. Caleb didn’t wear a watch, but somehow he always managed to know what time it was. ‘Yeah?’

‘It is eleven twenty-three. Of all the times I have undertaken reconnaissance with you, they have never been later than eleven p.m.’

He wasn’t wrong. It was weird how punctual these guys were. Beau would have thought that being cursed with immortality meant that you could chill on being on time for things, but apparently not. Just as Beau was thinking that, she heard what sounded like firecrackers, only they weren’t. Beau had lit enough firecrackers, and fired enough guns in her time to be able to tell them apart, and this was definitely gunfire.

Procedure was a little iffy on this part. ‘Hey Caleb, you remember how it’s Cobalt Soul policy to immediately get involved if it seems like something bad’s going down?’

‘I seem to recall the exact opposite,’ Caleb said, drily. He had certainly worked with Beau long enough to know exactly what she was planning, and was already tightening his gauntlets. Fingerless gloves that allowed him to cast, but protected his skin from the more destructive elements. Standard battlemage kit.

‘Well I’m not letting someone else get the credit for all of our hard work.’ Beau pulled out her stake gun, and checked that it was loaded. It was a lot like a regular pistol, and could, potentially be loaded with regular bullets, but the stake-point rounds would fuck up a human as much as it would fuck up a vampire. The round was designed to split on impact, revealing a tiny ashen stake that would ostensibly pierce the heart. At least they would if Beau could manage to consistently hit them there. More than once, she’d managed to stake a vampire in the leg, which was definitely painful for them, but not really lethal. At least it kept them laughing at her long enough that she could shoot again.

Gun once more safely in its holster, Beau vaulted up the fire escape to the second floor. A childhood of ballet (which she’d hated) and gymnastics (which she’d kind of liked) classes meant that it was hardly more difficult than climbing a ladder. For Caleb, it took a little longer.

Huffing, he was at her side a minute or so later. Beau had her ear at the door, listening. She heard half a dozen more gunshots, louder now that she was up by the door.

The door was locked, but all it took was a very subtle wave from Caleb’s hand, and it clicked open. Beau resisted the urge to kick it into the door stopper. She’d tried that once, and the door had bounced back and hit her in the face. Fjord, who had been with her at the time, had laughed his ass off. Turned out not every door had a clip to keep it open.

They crept through quietly, Beau with her gun out, and Caleb with his hands at the ready. She’d just barely turned a corner when something large flew into her – no, was _thrown_ into her – sending her crashing back into the wall.

Beau felt a rib or two crack, but the body on top of her was dead weight. She’d just managed to kick it off before Caleb stepped in front of her, and was firing a quick bolt of fire at whoever it was that had attacked. The attacker answered with gunfire, and a guttural gasp from Caleb told Beau that he had been hit.

‘Caleb!’ Beau jumped to her feet, wincing as her ribs shifted. The body that had damn near knocked her out disintegrated to dust on the ground.

‘I am fine,’ Caleb grimaced. He was holding a hand up to his bleeding arm. The coat was so filthy that you could barely tell the blood from all the other viscera that it had come into contact with over the years.

In the split second between Beau going down and then getting up again, whoever had chucked the vampire, whoever had shot Caleb, had disappeared.

‘Did you see them?’ Beau asked, already knowing the answer. The hallway was veiled in impenetrable darkness. Almost a magical darkness.

‘ _Nein_ ,’ Caleb said, shaking his head. Even that mere movement seemed to agitate his arm. ‘Aaaaah.’ He grimaced, and stumbled back slightly. Beau could see that his hand was covered in blood from trying to staunch the wound.

‘Stay here,’ Beau told him. ‘Deal with that. I’m gonna go check out the rest of this place.’

‘I do not think—’

‘Remember how you technically work for me?’ Beau interjected. Caleb gave her a look. A look that said, “please do not try and play that card.” She didn’t blame him. After all, the consultant thing was in name only. In general, Beau treated them as partners, rather than underlings. But if it was a question of keeping Caleb safe, then she was perfectly happy to hurt his feelings.

‘I will guard the door,’ he said, finally. He didn’t seem very agreeable with the situation, but he was also having a decent amount of difficulty standing. There was a sizzling sort of sound, and the sudden smell of burned flesh, and Beau realized that Caleb had cauterized his wound. He clenched his gloved fist, and settled himself beside the door. No-one would be getting out that way without going through Caleb.

Before Beau could go anywhere, though, Caleb put a hand to her shoulder. ‘Be safe,’ he said. Beau nodded.

As she moved deeper into the building, the gunshots faded. Whoever it was that had come here was almost done. Or, alternatively, the vampires that met here wiped out whatever intruders had come for them. Beau wasn’t sure which option she preferred.

There were whispers coming from the room ahead. Beau slowed to a crawl, cursing the way her heart hammered. If there were any vamps still around, they would surely hear it. ‘—that’s the last of them,’ a voice said. Male. Reasonably young. It was lightly accented, though it was an accent that Beau couldn’t place. ‘They’re all dust.’

‘What about the other two?’ This one was female, and accented in a completely different sort of way.

‘They’re vampire hunters—the last thing we want to do is start fucking around with them.’ Beau frowned. She was pretty sure he’d said a name in the middle there, but she hadn’t quite heard it. It hadn’t sounded like an Empire name, but then, the Empire was made up of more than just its citizens. ‘We should get out of here.’

Beau edged up to the door, and looked through the crack. There were two figures, one a purple tiefling, and the other so shrouded in shadow that it was hard to tell, but she could have been human. Definitely a woman. Pretty fucking built, too.

Beau lowered her goggles over her eyes. Through them, the two figures could have been standing in a well-lit room, and yet somehow, the woman still looked like she was in darkness.

The purple demon, surprisingly, read as vampire. His body temp was pretty low, and Beau could see healed scars on his neck. Could have been a turner. The fact that he was a demon screwed with the readings a little bit. His body temp should have been dangerously low, but as an infernal creature, it wasn’t. The fact that his blood didn’t pump, his heart didn’t beat, was a much more effective indicator.

The woman, on the other hand, was a little more confusing. In fact, her body temperature read as slightly higher than normal, so she definitely wasn’t human, but there were some things that could cause high body temperatures in vampires. Even veiled in shadow, Beau could see a pair of spectral, skeletal wings that sprouted from her shoulders. Well that was something fucking new. The readings were very, very confused. They seemed to jump from vampire, to lycanthrope, to celestial, to, for some inane reason, gorgon. The woman definitely didn’t have snake-hair, so it was hard to tell what that was about.

Very, very quietly, Beau raised her camera. There was no way she would forget what this woman looked like – long, black hair, and muscles the size of soccer balls. Definitely Beau’s type, but you couldn’t really use the description “looked like she would kick the crap out of me and I’d say thank-you” when you were trying to find out more intel on someone. Zeenoth, at least, would give a beleaguered sigh, the same way he did every time he had to read one of Beau’s reports. “Beauregard,” he would say. “The highly regarded Expositors of the Cobalt Soul tend not to put their sexual fantasies in after action reports.” Now, Beau did it just to mess with him. It was highly entertaining.

The moment the shutter clicked, the woman’s head snapped to the door. _Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck_. Her piercing eyes were hypnotic, and Beau had never seen anything like them. One was a greenish-blue color, and the other was a pale purple. They were beautiful, and they were staring straight at Beau’s. Beau tried to will herself to take another photo, but her whole body was frozen.

The woman held Beau’s gaze for a little while longer, and Beau could have sworn that she saw a smile. Then, she looked away.

Beau breathed a sigh of relief, too late remembering that she was supposed to be hiding.

That was the last thing she remembered.


	2. Tricky got me in

II-Tricky got me in

It could have been seconds, or minutes or even hours later that Caleb was shaking her awake. ‘Beauregard!’ he said, in a harsh whisper. ‘Beauregard! Are you okay?’

‘What happened?’ Beau mumbled. Caleb didn’t answer, instead helping Beau to her feet. Her head was kind of fuzzy, as though she’d hit it at one point, which, admittedly, she had. But Beau had been hit in the head lots of times, and this was something different.

‘They are all gone,’ he told her. There was a long, strained pause. ‘Please do not ask me to do that again,’ he said. His voice was very quiet, and Beau immediately felt like kind of a dick for having pulled rank. More to the point, though, she was kind of surprised that Caleb had listened to her. He must have been really fucked up. ‘I think we should call a clean-up crew.’

Beau was glad that he had suggested it. The clean-up crews were not nearly as well-trained as the Expositors, but given that six months of work had been blown by a pair of vigilantes in a single night, that was the last thing on Beau’s mind. Even still, she gave the room she’d been standing outside of a quick onceover, just to see if their new friends had left anything substantial.

They hadn’t.

It had been a shitshow of a night, and Beau was not looking forward to getting her ass chewed out over it.

‘We fucked up,’ she said.

There was a long pause. ‘ _Ja_ ,’ Caleb said, finally. ‘ _Ja,_ I did figure that one out, Beauregard.’ Beau ignored the deadpan jibe from Caleb. He could be forgiven, having been shot and all.

‘We gotta go,’ Beau continued. Caleb didn’t argue. It was already more of a bloodbath than either of them had anticipated. Beau’s whole body was throbbing from where she’d hit the wall. Caleb was still bleeding, in spite of his ill-advised first aid.

‘One of them had horns,’ Beau told him, apropos of nothing. Caleb processed this news quietly. Not that having horns was necessarily a point against someone. Jester had horns, after all. It was just that Beau had never met a vampire with horns. Vampires tended towards turning people they could control, people that didn’t already have ties to the magical world, which generally meant humans. Either this guy was an anomaly, or he was high enough up the food chain to have been around a while. Probably the latter. Both of them had moved with a sort of air of authority that suggested that they didn’t take orders. Either vigilantes, or a new crew moving into town and taking out the competition. Neither option was particularly palatable.

‘The other one had wings,’ Beau said, in a voice that she would have considered an attempt to be off hand. _This_ , Caleb did react to, and she didn’t blame him. Demons was one thing, but there were very few creatures around that had wings. Some of the older vampires did, though only when they were in bat form, and some of the faeries did, but the scanner would have reacted if there had been faerie. Though, faerie magic _was_ pretty good at throwing the scanners off; every time Beau had tried to scan Jester for fun, it had resolutely told her that Jester was a centaur, and Jester was only _half_ fae. Shit, maybe this chick _was_ a faerie.

Faeries and vampires working together wasn’t great news. Beau would much prefer if they _were_ vigilantes then. At least then it would be simpler.

‘Beauregard,’ Caleb said, and Beau realized she’d been standing there, staring at the wall and thinking to herself for the last three minutes. ‘We should go.’ He gave a gasping pain, and grabbed his arm again. Yes. Shit. Caleb needed a doctor.

‘Can you Circle us?’ Beau asked. If he was too injured to cast, then Beau was sure she could carry him to…well, about to the fire escape.

‘I am fine,’ Caleb said, which was both a lie, and not really answering the question. He took his uninjured arm, and inscribed a large, fiery circle in the wall behind them. The wall seemed to burn for a moment, before opening a doorway to the Expositor’s quarters at the Valley Archive. It would have been a forty-minute cab ride, or an hour and a half on the tram, with two interchanges, if Caleb hadn’t been able to cast.

The magic would take it out of him a little more than Beau would have liked, but at least they wouldn’t be dealing with the all the drunkards catching the number eighty-six back to the Outersteads.

At this time of night, the Valley Archive was near empty. Caleb faltered halfway to the medical office, leaving Beau to wrap his good arm around her shoulder and half carry him the rest of the way.

Thankfully, the medical office was less empty than the rest of the place Jester (Beau’s heart did a little leap) was doing medicine stock take. She almost dropped her clipboard when she saw Beau limping in with Caleb. ‘Holy _shit_ you guys.’ She ran over to help Caleb onto one of the hospital beds in the opposite side of the room. As they moved, she pumped a not-insignificant amount of healing energy into Caleb, who gave a relieved sigh. ‘I _just_ started my shift, and you’re coming in with bullet wounds?’

‘Thank-you, Jester,’ he mumbled. Beau helped Jester take off Caleb’s coat, and roll up the sleeves of his button-up shirt. Caleb had just enough cognizance to pull his holstered books away from them. Beau almost rolled her eyes.

The initial heal had stopped the bleeding, but Jester took one brief look at the wound, and declared that the bullet was still in there. They had been pretty small caliber, Beau thought; more of a _pop_ than a _crack_.

It didn’t take too long for Jester to find it, and pull it out, with no small amount of cursing in Zemnian from Caleb.

‘Huh,’ Jester said. ‘I guess I probably technically should have given you some anesthetic first.’

‘ _Ja_ ,’ Caleb said. ‘Probably.’ In spite of this, he had a soft look on his face. Jester did have that effect on people. She could have been arrested for murder, and half the Cobalt Soul would have lined up to give wildly varying alibis, Beau included.

Jester turned her attention to Beau, and Beau waved her off. ‘’m fine,’ she said. It was only kind a lie. ‘Whacked my head a bit, but it’ll be alright.’ That wasn’t entirely true. Her ribs were also giving her a bit of grief still. Probably cracked, Beau thought. She had cracked enough ribs in her time to know exactly what it felt like. But, if Jester told her that, then Jester would also tell her to get some rest, and Beau was Not About That right now.

Thankfully, there was no concussion, at the very least, and Beau very quickly made her departure, with Caleb in tow.

No sooner than they had left the medical office, they ran into absolutely the last person in the world that Beau wanted to see right now.

Dairon looked harried, dark bags underneath dark eyes. Her blue and grey suit was slightly rumpled, which for Dairon was akin to walking around with a food stain down their front.

They took one look at Beau, a rapidly forming bruise on her face, and at Caleb, gunshot wound expertly wrapped, both of them looking more than a little singed. They sighed. Beau opened her mouth to explain, but Dairon waved a hand to cut her off. ‘You know what,’ she said. ‘Tell me in the morning.’

Beau recognized a rebuke when she heard one, and was grateful for it. Though she hadn’t really been _that_ injured – at least compared to Caleb – she had no particular desire to have her actions picked apart by Dairon at this time of night. What she wanted…well, what she wanted was some fucking food.

‘You hungry?’ she asked Caleb, who stared at her. He didn’t even have to say anything.

Beau shrugged. ‘I’ll take that as a no,’ she said.

‘I am going to go home and sleep for the next twenty hours,’ Caleb announced. ‘I will perhaps eat some bread.’

‘Alright, alright.’ Beau went to clap him on the shoulder, and just barely stopped herself in time. ‘I’ll see you sometime tomorrow, yeah?’

‘Probably the afternoon,’ Caleb called back, as he left the building. On her way out, Beau filed a request for a clean-up crew at the vamp den. There was a crew on call twenty-four seven to deal with situations exactly like this one. It was probably something she should have done as soon as they had gotten back, but she had been far more concerned with making sure that Caleb’s arm didn’t fall off.

Beau almost went back to the medical office to see if _Jester_ wanted to grab something to eat, but decided against it. As the night shift medical officer, she would have to stick around for hours yet, just in case any other Expositors had run into the same issues as Beau and Caleb. The day shift medic, Caduceus, didn’t start until eight a.m. Plus, there was all that other weird tension that Beau really didn’t want to think about right now.

“Food” invariably meant a detour to Rinaldo’s. Rinaldo made some pretty decent tacos, amidst a range of other weird disparate nighttime foods. Beau generally went there, not because she liked it any more than other places (The Innerstead Sprawl had no shortage of amazing eateries), but because she got a discount, on account of having saved his daughter from a fire snake. Admittedly, Fjord and Jester had been there as well, but neither of them really frequented this part of town. Jester lived in the Tri-Spires, and Fjord…well, Beau had absolutely no idea where Fjord lived. He had mentioned a boat, at one point, but even the Eisfus River was far enough away that he probably didn’t live on it.

Rinaldo greeted Beau warmly as she entered the tiny establishment. It was now twelve-thirty, but there was no shortage of patrons. She had to wait five minutes while a very slow moving tortle finished up his burrito in a booth near the back. ‘You getting into trouble again, Beauregard?’ He had a Trost accent, not too out of place here in Zadash. Lots of Trost citizens moved north to find work in the big city. The breweries were mostly family owned, after all, and most of the other work was low paying enough that it was difficult to survive. It was a lot like Kamordah in that way, though probably slightly less pretentious.

‘I’m always in trouble,’ Beau told him, grinning. She ordered three blackened salmon tacos, and three pulled pork. She normally didn’t overindulge this much, but getting knocked out usually made her super hungry, among other things. Even though she’d decided not to order a drink, Rinaldo brought over a fruity coconut thing in a pineapple anyway.

She left him a nice tip. As nice as she could afford to, any rate.

It was only one a.m, and Beau was still wired. She always was when recon turned into action. If she went home to her shoebox apartment now, then she’d be lying awake for hours, regardless of how many times she tried to masturbate herself to sleep.

At least if she went out, she’d be able to have a good time. Something she was sorely in need of right now.


	3. Time to feed the monster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has some non-explicit sexual content, and also some...vampirism, I guess?

III-Time to feed the monster

Good times were not too difficult to find in Zadash. It had its fair share of normal clubs, and bars and late-night karaoke places, but what really set Zadash aside from anywhere else was its vamp bars. Vamp bars were something that you couldn’t find anywhere else in Wildemount. At least not vamp bars like these.

It wasn’t that there weren’t any vampires or supernatural creatures in Rexxentrum or Port Damali. There were thousands. Beau and Fjord had once tracked a murderous hag through the streets of Port Damali, trying to stop her from stealing the hearts of children. Zadash was what people (both natural and supernatural) called the Crossroads City. Built, as it was, at the intersection of the Amber Road, the Bromkiln Byway, that could have been justification enough for the name, but the real meaning, Beau knew, was related to the fact that Zadash was a soft spot in the world. A place where beings from other planes of existence could cross over to the Material Plane with far less effort than if they’d been trying anywhere else in the world.

The problem with that (apart from all the very obvious problems) was that Zadash was a hotspot for ill-intentioned young shitrags looking to summon demons, or bring about the apocalypse.

That was where the Cobalt Soul Institute for the Control of Supernatural Creatures came into it.

The Soul, she was sure, would be very upset to see the way Beau spent her free time. If they questioned it, Beau was sure she could spin it as “information gathering,” but there was a fine line between information gathering and hanging out at vamp bars to pick up hungry dead chicks.

Okay, that might have been putting it unfairly. It would be more accurate to say that she was hanging out to let hungry dead chicks pick up her. Sex was great, but sex with a vampire was fucking phenomenal.

That was the beauty of it. The weird zombie thing meant that she couldn’t be turned, and the law-abiding vampires were cautious enough that they didn’t want to leave a trail of dead bodies that led back to one of their favorite night-time haunts. “Fucked up,” would probably be the term that the Cobalt Soul shrinks (and Caleb, and Fjord, and Veth) would use, but “fucked up” was exactly where Beau wanted to be right now. Maybe it made her a hypocrite, and maybe her ass would get fired if anyone ever found out, but for now, she was just having a good time.

Half a dozen pairs of eyes locked onto Beau the moment she sat down at the bar. She’d only been to this particular vamp bar a couple of times before. She didn’t like establishing patterns, just in case someone caught wind of what she did. Better to be an infrequent patron at a dozen bars, than a frequent patron at one.

In spite of all of this, though, Beau’s scent and her heartbeat very clearly marked her as a human. The smell was probably a little bit off, on account of all the other weirdness, but Beau had never bothered asking any vampires exactly how she smelled. Funnily enough, there wasn’t a lot of talking at these places.

The first vamp that showed up was clearly one of some importance. A half-orc dude with shredded abs, and an ill-advised goatee. Beau shook her head, not even looking up from the bar. She wasn’t sure if the sudden peal of raucous laughter was directed at her, or at the half-orc.

The second one that came up _was_ female, but gave Beau an uneasy feeling that she didn’t like at all. Sultry lips, and wavy hair, and everything just a little too perfect. Probably a succubus. Beau made a mental note to make an anonymous tip. Succubi at a vamp bar was a very big no no. As if to remind Beau of that fact, she glanced over to the sign above the bar that read “Consent is Critical.” Beau couldn’t help but snort. The bar wasn’t worried about the humans that frequented it. It was worried about its feeding license. If it got out that the vampires here were feeding on people without their consent, it would get shut down in an instant.

The third one that came over was near perfect.

Beau knew that the vamps liked to make a game of it, especially for humans that were very clearly nervous, or inexperienced with the process. They’d keep sending people over, until they struck gold, or until the patron got weirded out and left. Beau sometimes like to indulge their games, seeing exactly how outlandish they could get with their offerings.

That wasn’t going to happen tonight.

The thing was, elven vampires were fucking hot.

Beau much preferred being with them over vampires that had been humans, for example. Humans had kind of a chip in their shoulder about the whole “immortality” thing, and got kind of weird lording it over non-vamps, even if they were non-vamps by choice. Elves, on the other hand, already being long-lived, were much more casual about the whole thing, and didn’t really shove it in your face.

As casual as elves could be, at any rate. They got a little haughty over some things, and were pretty good at bossing Beau around, but in the context she was seeing them, that was exactly what she was looking for.

This elf had amber-colored skin, and platinum hair. She was probably two-hundred and fifty, if she was a day. Probably close to Dairon’s age.

Not that Dairon was someone that Beau wanted to be thinking about right now. The elf would _kill_ Beau if they found out what she was doing.

That was why all the bite marks were in places that Dairon would never see.

The elf – Vorsah, she told Beau – led Beau by the arm to the back. Beau had a green band on her wrist, the universal vamp bar code for “I’m not interested in talking much”. Every vamp bar had what were generously called feeding rooms in the back, though a lot more than just feeding got done in most of them. The good news was, they were cleaned regularly.

‘You are very tense today,’ Vorsah murmured, as she brushed Beau’s hair away from her neck. Vorsah could hardly fail to notice the large bruise on Beau’s cheek, or the ones across her ribs.

‘Run-in with some bad clients,’ Beau said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. The elf lifted Beau’s tank top up over her head, and began to lave kisses up her stomach. Jester had done enough healing that it didn’t hurt too much, but there was something vaguely ironic in having a vampire be the one kissing her there.

Beau was wearing a sports bra, so instead of unclipping it, they had to do an awkward sort of shuffle to get it off. The first sensation of teeth against skin was the best thing Beau had felt all week. She did not even need to look down to know that there was blood welling up around the wound, and she pushed Vorsah’s head into her chest, as though encouraging the vampire to take more.

And take, Vorsah did. ‘You have such rich blood,’ she murmured, as she came up for air. Beau was entirely certain that the vampire didn’t actually need air, but she generally tried not to take everything from the same spot.

Even still, vampires were not light feeders, and there was no point in coming to a vamp club if you weren’t chasing the weird high that came with excessive blood loss. That might have been masochistic, but no-one had ever accused Beau of having healthy coping mechanisms.

By the time things were finished, they were both satisfied; Vorsah from blood, and Beau from three fingers and a tongue. On her way out, Beau grabbed the complimentary antivirals out of habit. It wouldn’t hurt to take them just in case. The last thing she needed was to get a case of vampirism when she spent her whole day trying to wipe the damn things out. That would be a very awkward meeting with Dairon.

For half a second, Beau was sure she’d seen a tall figure with mismatched eyes, somewhere in the crowd of the bar, but she decided that it was probably just a trick of her imagination.

It was a short walk from the vamp bars to Beau’s apartment in the Innerstead Sprawl. The apartment that she could barely afford to live in.

It wasn’t that the Cobalt Soul was cheap. Well, they were, but not for lack of trying. Their funding was already stretched to the bone, no pun intended. A couple of months ago, someone had suggested cutting the medical officer from three shifts down to two, and it had lasted a grand total of four days before they realized that they wouldn’t be able to afford all the funerals. Once, Beau had committed the egregious error of forgetting to recharge a daylight blaster, and Dairon had inflicted the creative punishment of forcing her to go on the Internet and apply for every grant that she could find, regardless of its relevance. They’d gotten three thousand gold pieces from the Diarchy of Uthodurn for use in…something. Beau had never been entirely clear what. Thankfully, that had been the extent of her relationship with the finances.

The Soul _did_ subsidize Beau’s rent, at the very least. But the Innerstead Sprawl wasn’t the cheapest place to live, even when you did live in a veritable shoebox. Beau was certain it wasn’t even a real apartment, just a sliver of space that wasn’t big enough to do anything else with.

Generously, it could have been called a studio, but even that was pushing it. There was enough space for a very small twin bed, and an even smaller table, both of which folded up into the wall. Beau had never even _seen_ a Murphy table until she’d started renting this place. All of her stuff was in big plastic tubs under the bed, and Beau had definitely never met anyone else that had to move the kitchen sink if they wanted to take a shower.

This was not a smash pad.

If Beau was going to hook up with someone (completely aside from vamp dens), it was in pub bathrooms, or at their place. Even a cheap, shitty motel room was something she couldn’t really afford, thanks to the fact that student loan repayments took up the majority of her meagre salary. She tried not to think about her parents in their big, fancy Estate in Kamordah, and how because of them she hadn’t been eligible for any of the low-income scholarships.

Not that she missed them. The nicest thing they’d ever done for Beau was kick her out of the house at sixteen. It was what led her to Zadash, to the Cobalt Soul, to her friends. Every Barren Eve, she got a card from them, which only seemed to serve as a painful reminder, more than anything else. These days, Beau threw them away without even looking inside.

Sex, and a feeding-high put Beau in a relaxed sort of mood, like she’d had a nice spliff of the good weed that Caduceus got from some dude in Alfield. She’d smoked some of it out on her fire escape a couple of times, before the neighbors had complained to the super.

In spite of her relaxed state, it still took Beau almost an hour to get to sleep, and when she did, it was fraught with dreams. That was one of the unfortunate side-effects of doing some good old-fashioned blood swapping. It forged a weird, magical connection that had you dreaming their memories for the next couple of nights. Beau had had some really fucking weird dreams.

Vorsah’s memories were interesting enough. Definitely at least two hundred years old, judging by the things Beau saw. Zadash, before it was a city of high-rises and traffic lights, and cross-country travel before the Amber Byway had been paved, and men in three-piece suits with top hats.

At one point, the dreams drifted into visions of the strange vampires that she’d seen. The bright purple demon with red eyes, and the gorgeous, dark-haired woman with purple and green eyes. Those eyes pierced into Beau’s very soul, as though the woman was actively invading her dreams, rather than just being a highlight of them.

After she woke, sweaty and confused (and okay, a little horny again), it took a very long time for Beau to get back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a review if you are enjoying the story! I am all out of the pre-written chapters, and reviews are excellent motivators!


	4. Little angel go away

IV – Little angel go away

It was well past noon when Beau woke, almost as tired as she had been when she’d finally fallen asleep. She ate cereal with milk that was just shy of expiry, and had a shower that didn’t even come close to hot.

What she really needed to do was find a sugar momma. A middle-aged vampire that only wanted blood and sex, and Beau could sleep in her big fancy bed, and take baths in her big fancy bathtub.

A bit of a pipe dream, really. There was a lot that the Cobalt Soul were willing to ignore, but that would undoubtedly be a bridge too far.

Ah well. She could dream.

Beau was just getting dressed when she heard the buzzing on her phone. A text message from Dairon, that read “come and see me when you get in.” Beau groaned.

She’d almost forgotten about the whole “telling her boss what happened,” thing. It was such a nice, if fleeting thought that it might all just go away. But no. Their months’ long hunt of a vampire den that was torn apart in a single night by two unknown figures was apparently something that had to be dealt with.

Go figure.

However much blood Vorsah had taken the previous night hadn’t quite fully replenished, and wouldn’t do so for a while. There was a general rule, among feeders that you should wait at least four weeks between “encounters”. That way, the red-blood cell count was closer to full, and, theoretically, the blood tasted much nicer. So, Beau would be a little off her game for at least the next day or two, and potentially a lot longer.

Wouldn’t be the first time. Probably wouldn’t be the last, either. If there was one thing that Beau was really, really good at, it was finding all sorts of unhealthy coping mechanisms.

Dairon, as predicted, was in their office, on the phone to what sounded like the High Curator. That wasn’t a good sign. The only reason the High Curator ever called was to chew them out, or to cut the budget. Or, once in a blue moon, to give them a difficult and dangerous assignment that was impossible for any mortal. Those were always fun.

Dairon held up a single finger. Beau sat down in the chair opposite, and was treated to the rare sight of Dairon rolling their eyes at whoever was on the phone. Definitely the High Curator, then. ‘Yes, Mr. Turray,’ she said. ‘I understand. We will make sure that it is done.’ She hung up. ‘That fucking snake.’

Beau grinned. She did love it when Dairon was pissed at someone other than her. ‘Anything I need to worry about?’

‘Not just yet,’ Dairon grimaced. So it would be Beau’s problem at some point. Things usually did end up that way. Great. ‘The clean-up crew found some things,’ Dairon told her. Beau winced as she adjusted her position in the chair. Fang marks could be a pain in the…well, yeah.

‘Any idea on who our mysterious friends were?’ Beau remembered, too late, that she hadn’t actually _told_ Dairon that there had been two mysterious vampires there, but apparently Dairon knew anyway. Typical. Caleb must have told her.

‘None.’ Beau didn’t know why she wasn’t surprised. ‘There was indication that they may have _Teleport_ ed in, and they destroyed any trace of their presence there. But, they did manage to wipe out the entire den, so our investigation will need to be…shall we say recalibrated.’

‘Great.’ Beau didn’t bother hiding the sarcasm. Recalibration always involved a lot of long, boring meetings, usually ending with a decision that had been made in the first ten minutes.

‘Mr. Widogast tells me that you may have gotten photos.’

_Fuck_. Beau had forgotten entirely about the photos that she had taken. At the very least, she should have had a photo of the h—of the one with wings. She went to her satchel, and pulled out the camera. When she did her report, she would have to print them all out.

There were a couple of dozen photos on the memory card, some of which Beau didn’t remember taking. The one she _did_ remember taking was the last one there; the last one she had taken before something had fucked with her head.

She stared at it, and time seemed to stand still.

It wasn’t that the photo was empty. The tiefling was there, after all, his red eyes glowing. Where the woman should have been, there was a blurry sort of darkness that Beau couldn’t even begin to describe. Not that she didn’t have the words, just that every time she tried, she felt a sharp pain in her head, and her nose started to bleed.

‘Shit!’ Beau grabbed at the box of tissues on Dairon’s desk, and tried to stem the flow. The moment she put the camera down, though, the pain in her head went away.

Dairon took the camera, and, before Beau could warn her, looked at the picture. Apparently, they were made of stronger stuff, because though their teeth were gritted, they managed to hold on, and try and analyze the image. Finally, though, it was too much, and they put the camera down heavily on the desk.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Beau asked, hoping like fuck that Dairon had a better answer.

‘One of the seraphim,’ Dairon told her. ‘An angel. They have always been a little tricky to capture on film. The fact that you were able to even look without your eyes burning out is impressive.’ Beau was pretty sure that was a joke. She _hoped_ that was a joke.

_Holy shit_ , though _._ ‘An _angel_? What the fuck is an angel doing down here, and why are they hanging out with vampire demons?’

‘Perhaps the term “fallen angel,” would be more accurate,’ Dairon admitted. ‘Once they fall from their celestial grace, they do take on a quasi-mortal form. It would not be impossible for a fallen angel to be somehow infected with vampirism, however unlikely. You may need to do some research.’

She looked rattled, and Beau didn’t blame her. A new den of vamps in the city was one thing, but if one of those vamps was a fallen angel? Definitely bad news.

‘Do you think you could describe the angel?’ Dairon suggested. Beau suppressed a laugh. That face – that body – was going to be cemented in her mind for a very long time.

‘I think so,’ she said, keeping a straight face. ‘Want me to get J—Doctor Lavorre to give it a go?’ Doctor Lavorre – Jester – had become the unofficial sketch artist of the Cobalt Soul. Any time expositors were too busy fleeing for their lives, or the camera was melted by acid, or the monster in question set off a temporal fluctuation and reversed time so that they had never been there in the first place, Jester did the best she could to get them a working portrait.

‘Yes, I think that would be best. Have your report on my desk by tomorrow afternoon.’ Dairon turned her attention immediately from Beau back to her paperwork, and Beau recognized it for the dismissal that it was. Dairon was generally pretty circumspect with their words.

Jester’s shift didn’t start until midnight. That gave Beau about eight hours to actually write her report, making sure she didn’t skimp on the details. Dairon had given her grief more than once for a report that had been very stream of consciousness, perhaps a bit more verbose than was recommended for a formal after-action report.

She made her way down to the library. At four o’clock in the afternoon, it was reasonably quiet. Most of the people that had come in for a daytime study session had packed up their books and left, and the ones that preferred to come at night hadn’t yet arrived.

Beau was surprised to find Fjord sitting in one of the carrels near the back. He seemed deep into a very large book that Beau could not see the title of. Not wanting to make too much noise (Zeenoth would be all to happy to saddle her with re-shelving duty) Beau rummaged in her satchel, and threw a small, drawstring bag of rice at him. If he’d been a vampire, HR would have called it bullying.

‘Hey, what the f—’ Fjord turned around, and stopped when he saw who it was. Even still, they both got a reprimanding throat-clear from the blond elf that was busy scanning returns at the main desk. ‘What the fuck,’ he said, in a much lower whisper. ‘Don’t you have vampires to bang?’ Beau shot him a very rude gesture. Fjord was the only one who knew, and it was going to stay that way.

She sat down next to him, arms folded over the back of the chair. ‘Whatcha reading?’ Fjord wasn’t the sort of person that generally spent a lot of time in the library. Not that he was unintelligent. He was just much, much better at the street smarts sort of thing, at getting out into the world and talking to people. For that reason, they made a pretty good team when they worked together. Beau doing the book stuff, and Fjord doing the people stuff.

Fjord marked his page with a finger, and showed her the book. “The Mystery of the Sirens.”

‘Ah, there’s no mystery to sirens,’ Beau said, in an off-hand sort of voice. ‘Get Caleb to light up a building, and you’ll get sirens no trouble.’ Fjord rolled his eyes. He knew, of course, that she was acting dumb. As part of her university studies, Beau had done a capstone thesis on cryptozoology and its relation to history. She knew what a siren was.

‘Very funny. Some of my contacts are sending me reports of ships going missing in the Swavain Isles,’ he told her. ‘Marius thinks there might be mysterious sexy women luring people to their deaths.’

‘I do love mysterious, sexy women.’ Beau was thinking of the angel, and her green and purple eyes. She almost ended up with another nosebleed, and it had nothing to do with weird angel shit. ‘That’s pretty much just a honeytrap.’

The first thing Beau did was write her report. Since she’d sort of blacked out for most of the mission, there was frustratingly little to write. “Waited in an alley, got surprised by a hot angel and a weird demon, blacked out.” Plus, of course, “blah, blah, blah, Caleb got shot, and I got crushed by a flying corpse,” but that seemed hardly relevant to what was really important.

The rest of the report would have to wait until Beau had gotten the sketch finished. In the meantime, she grabbed as many books as she could find on angels. The books in the library were far more reliable than any internet search that she could do. Invariably, searching things like “angel”, even when you did try to go for the more academic sources, led to stories about people being saved from car accidents by mysterious white robed figures, or stories of mishaps that people had while on angel dust, which, while thoroughly entertaining, weren’t going to have the information she was looking for.

At the very least, the books had been sourced by the Zeenoths of the world, and generally had pretty good information when it came to cryptids.

Angels, though. That was definitely a new one.

Beau shouldn’t have been surprised. It certainly made sense that an angel couldn’t be picked up on a scanner, couldn’t show up in photographs. Beau was definitely surprised that she could still remember what this angel looked like. She’d certainly be seeing her in dreams later, that was for sure.

Around six o’clock, Beau felt a tap on the shoulder. She was midway through reading about the aasimar, and their divine ancestry. It was pretty cool stuff, if she was honest. Apparently there were more angels around than she had thought. Or at least…descendants of angels.

‘You hungry?’ Fjord had clearly finished his own reading. ‘I hear the kitchens are doing a nice rat casserole for dinner.’ It was a joke that had been much, much less funny the night they had actually served rat casserole. The entire building had been in an uproar, and they’d all had to go to sensitivity training for not respecting diverse cultural dishes. In any case, the kitchens had never served rat casserole again. Or at least, when they did, they made sure to have an alternative.

What they did have was a nice enough lasagna that Beau ate three servings of, and an apple pie that had almost definitely been bought in bulk at the supermarket. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. This was definitely preferable to the cereal and expired milk that was waiting for her at home.

Unfortunately, it did mean that going to the gym afterwards was not the greatest idea. She should have done it beforehand, when her stomach wasn’t full of food. Fjord did not hide how grateful he was at this fact.

‘Torture me another time.’ Beau threw a fork at his head, which he easily dodged.

‘So, angels, huh?’ Fjord continued, as though there hadn’t just been a declaration of silverware war. He had clearly been paying attention (for the first time in his life) to what she had been reading. ‘Planning on converting?’

Beau snorted. She was a tried and true “I don’t give a fuck”ian, and that wasn’t going to change any time soon, regardless of how many angels she met. ‘Caleb tell you what happened last night?’

‘Well as I hear it, there’s not really much to tell. Someone went in and cleaned house, and messed with the head of the only person who saw it.’ He snatched an errant slice of tomato off her plate. ‘Fortunately, your head’s already fucked, so there wasn’t too much left to scramble.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ Beau muttered. Fjord wasn’t wrong, though. It was sort of a prerequisite for working here. After all, normal people didn’t want to go out into the pouring rain at two o’clock in the morning to handle a sudden influx of possessed chickens in the sewers, something that had sadly happened more than once. They were pretty sure there was an Enchantment Wizard of some kind that was getting rid of his failed experiments with a random Teleport, but they hadn’t quite managed to track him down. It was pretty low on the priority list compared to vamp dens and rabid werewolves.

‘Anyway,’ Fjord continued. ‘That does remind me that Caleb sends his apologies for not being here, but he forgot that he was teaching a guest lecture this evening. He might be around later, if there’s work, but no promises.’

Beau snorted. Caleb didn’t forget things. More likely, he had known, but hadn’t particularly wanted to mention it at half-past midnight when they were both considerably fucked up. If Beau had known, she probably would have attended, which, come to think of it, might have been why Caleb didn’t tell her. He was clearly sick of all the questions she kept asking him.

‘Anyway, one of the vamps that cleaned house was an angel. At least that what Dairon thinks. So I’m doing my research, just in case we run into them again.’ She frowned. ‘Hmm. You think you can kill an angel?’

‘Isn’t it a vampire angel? Could you not just stake her, like normal?’ He made a very dramatized staking gesture with his hand, that included cross his eyes, and poking his tongue out.

‘Dunno,’ Beau shrugged. ‘I guess I thought that maybe they were technically already dead. Though I guess vampires are already dead, too.’ It was definitely something that she was going to have to read into.

Fjord, on the other hand, was going home. ‘I’ve done my bit for the day,’ he said lightly. ‘I helped Caduceus rearrange the medicine cabinet so that it didn’t spell out rude words.’

Beau grinned. That was definitely a “Jester was bored” prank. They had all been subject to a “Jester was bored” prank, in their lives. Once Beau had gone to change into her tank-top for a gym session to find that someone had cut out holes where the nipples were. To this day, it remained as Beau’s favorite workout top.

Full to bursting point, Beau put her dirty plate in the dishwasher. There were weirdly, no missions on the ticket tonight, which meant that Beau went back to the library, and cracked a few more books on angels to while away the time before Jester’s shift started. She had been midway through figuring out the difference between the different kinds of angels, something that was apparently far more complicated than she had previously thought. Strangely, it was something that hadn’t been covered in any of her classes.

There were regular angels, beings of the upper planes, entities of goodness and light. Judging by the hand-drawn pictures, they were typically enormous, white-winged creatures, with greenish skin, and solid white eyes. They looked far more otherworldly, far less…human than the woman that Beau had seen. She got the distinct feeling that trying to look at a photo of this sort of creature _would_ burn her eyes out. Not to mention the fact that they all seemed to carry big fucking swords.

These angels were the result of the gods creating new bodies for their followers in the afterlife. So even if she wasn’t twelve feet tall, maybe this woman was the follower of some god? Possible, but there were also _other_ possibilities. More likely possibilities, even. Like the idea that this woman had angelic descendants, and it was just a recessive gene that had popped up in her genetic code. That, Beau was sure, would have been more likely to just show up as vampire, with a few ticks towards celestial.

There was something about her. Something…Beau couldn’t take her mind off this mysterious angel. The image of her violet and blue-green eyes, her perfectly sculpted form… _Fuck._

If she kept this up, she was going to have to take a _very_ cold shower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, leave a review if you like the story! Tell me what you liked, and what you didn't like.


	5. Someone else's atrocious stories

V- Someone else's atrocious stories

Jester arrived at five to midnight, just as the night shift medical officer was finishing up. Shakäste very patiently tolerated Beau sitting on the bench, swinging her legs, and looking up at the clock every five minutes. The jazz record that Shakäste had put on was playing softly, as though in another room, and Shakäste was humming along as if Beau wasn’t even there.

‘How’s the bite?’ he asked, genially, as he was tidying up the desk. It was a futile task, because by morning it would almost definitely be covered in candy wrappers and pastry crumbs.

‘Huh? Oh.’ Beau had almost forgotten about the zombie bite on her right clavicle. It was just one of those things. ‘Good. Potions seem to be suppressing the transformation pretty well. I don’t notice it most days.’ In light of all the other stuff that was happening, she had maybe sort of half forgotten about the zombie thing. For the most part, it was another minor annoyance. The vampire bites she got on a semi-regular basis were a much bigger problem.

‘Hi, Beau!’ Jester bounced in, her bright pink haversack on her back. She was wearing a green pinafore dress over the top of a white long-sleeved shirt. The moment she took the bag off, she put on a lab coat that had been decorated from top to bottom with donuts and unicorns. ‘You look much better today!’

It kind of felt like a backhanded compliment, even though Jester clearly meant it with the utmost sincerity.

‘Yeah, I, ah…worked out some kinks.’ Pun probably intended. ‘Do you have time to do a sketch for me? We think one of the suspects at the clusterfuck last night was an angel, and she’s not showing up in photos.’

‘Oooooh!’ Jester said. ‘That’s so cool. I _totally_ have time for you, Beau.’ Jester pulled a large sketchbook, and a bag of lollipops out of her haversack. Beau knew from experience that it was largely filled with pictures of dicks. She sat down cross-legged on one of the hospital beds. ‘Do you want a lollipop?’

‘No thanks.’ Beau was already very full from lasagna and apple pie.

Jester unwrapped a lollipop for herself, anyway. ‘So.’ She thrust the lollipop into her mouth. ‘On a scale of one to ten, how hot was she?’

‘Twelve,’ Beau said, immediately. She didn’t need any kind of picture to remember that much. Those muscles, and those eyes…

‘Uh huh,’ Jester said. ‘And on a scale of one to ten, how hot am I?’

‘T—’ Beau started, and then stopped when her brain caught up. ‘Come on, Jes. That’s not fair.’

‘Oh my _gosh_ ,’ Jester trilled. ‘You were about to say ten, weren’t you? Am I really not as hot as this mysterious sexy angel lady?’

It was an unfair question, but not for the reasons anyone would have thought. Beau had always thought of Jester as more “cute” than “hot.” Equally as pleasing, but for completely different reasons. ‘I was about to say—’ Beau’s mind went blank. She was usually so good at lying.

‘It’s okay Beau.’ Jester sounded inordinately pleased with herself. ‘I know that you _loooove_ me.’ Wow, if that wasn’t putting salt on the wound, then nothing was.

‘Can we please just do the picture?’ Beau could feel her face flushing with embarrassment. It was bad enough that Jester wasn’t interested. The tiefling in question looked mildly abashed, and Beau tried not to feel guilty for snapping.

Jester turned to a fresh page. On the very fast flip-through, Beau was pretty sure she caught a glimpse of a very detailed drawing of Fjord getting eaten by a whale.

‘Okay, what did she look like?’ Jester balanced her pencil between two fingers, nowhere near the page of the sketchbook.

‘Uh…Nice face. Nice eyes. Metal hair.’

‘ _Beeeau_ , you know you have to be specific,’ Jester chastised. ‘Nice can mean _so_ many things.’ Clearly.

‘Alright.’ Beau closed her eyes, and tried to picture the woman in her head. ‘The eyes were two different colors. One was purple, and the other was like a greenish-blue. Her hair was long, and in lots of braids. Black on top, but then fading down into white. She was wearing heavy metal eyeliner. Really big muscles, like she really liked bench pressing.’

The next hour or so, Jester drew, with Beau making occasional additions or corrections (‘She had like…a line tattooed on her chin—no, no, a vertical one. Yeah, like that.’). Finally, Jester produced a picture of the woman that Beau was sure was pretty close to how the angel had looked. Weirdly, looking at this one didn’t give her a headache.

Jester had done a close-up of the face, and a full body shot that showed the muscles and the wings. Beau was definitely going to have to make copies. Not for creepy reasons. She just got the idea that maybe this was the sort of person who had some kind of magical control over her image, and Beau didn’t want to forget someone that hot.

Okay, maybe the reasons were a little creepy.

Mostly, Beau wanted to make sure that if she saw this woman again, she knew about it. Just as importantly, though, she wanted to see if she could find anyone out in the world that knew exactly what the fuck was going on, and why these new vampires were wiping out rival dens. If the Cobalt Soul had a power play on their hands, then shit was about to get _very_ messy.

Beau went back down to the library, and printed off her report. She put the photos in as Exhibit A, and Jester’s sketches as Exhibit B. All the other photos, she was sure, would have gone in the clean-up crew’s report. Not that they would have had much to say beyond, “We found a bunch of dust piles.”

The dust piles themselves would have been brought back to the science labs for testing. It wasn’t something that Beau had been around for, but in her initial training, she’d heard of the time that a group of vamps had faked their own deaths by dumping out the contents of a vacuum cleaner, and making an anonymous tip. Moral of the story, never make assumptions.

Since there were apparently no missions to deal with tonight, Beau went home. It was a weird feeling. She half wanted to hit the town again, but even that felt like it would stretch her already waning energy. Without the adrenaline, she was a boring homebody.

Still, she stopped by the library on her way out, and signed out a couple of the more detailed books on angels. For some reason, this earned her a reproachful sort of glare from Zeenoth, who did not particularly approve of what he called her “flights of fancy.” Fair point. She did tend to…not romanticize, but maybe…dramatize things more than was strictly necessary. But it was Dairon that had suggested angels, so Beau didn’t consider it too out of the ordinary. Admittedly, the haughty look might have been because she was munching on a bear claw that she had stolen from Jester’s (very stale) stash.

Even if she wasn’t going to hit the town (read: hit the vamp bars), there was still something that Beau wanted to do. It involved going to a very different bar that was still frequented by vampires, but wasn’t specifically a “vamp bar,” or at the very least, not the kind of bar you went to if you were specifically looking to hook up with and get your blood drunk by a vampire.

This particular one smelled of stale beer, and peanuts, and raw meat. More than a few lycanthropes hung out at this bar as well, and Whelsen was the blue steak special night. For the most part, it kept pesky humans away. Beau was…well, she was tolerated there.

Most of the patrons knew that she worked for the Cobalt Soul, which should have been a problem, but strangely wasn’t, given that the Soul got rid of all the misbehaving supernatural creatures that gave the rest of them a bad name. Most vampires didn’t want to murder innocents, and get involved in blood trafficking, or anything like that. They just wanted to live their lives under the shadow of darkness, without anyone trying to kill them for the sharpness of their teeth, or how furry they got during full moon.

Beau didn’t want to talk to the vampires, or the werewolves or any of the other supernatural creatures here. She wanted to talk to Keg.

Keg was one of the bartenders, and was midway through pouring a round of beers for some very rowdy and very hairy werewolves, a couple of whom gave Beau the stink-eye when she sidled up to the bar next to them.

She didn’t exactly blame them; she probably smelled of vampire, even though she very clearly wasn’t a vampire. Bloodfuckers…well they got a reputation. Not a particularly nice one.

‘Who’ve you been sleeping with?’ Keg asked, as Beau sat down on the far bar stool.

‘No-one special, sadly. If I show you a couple of pictures, could you tell me if you recognize them?’ Beau had cut the photo of the tiefling and the blurry angel in half. She didn’t particularly want to kill anyone she was asking questions of. That might have put a damper on the situation. She passed over the photo, and Jester’s sketch. ‘Think there might be a new vamp den in town.’

Keg took out a pair of bent and battered glasses. They didn’t fit very well, and kept sliding down her nose.

She stared at the pictures for a very long time, clearly deep in thought. ‘Think I might’ve seen them,’ she said, finally. ‘But not here. I can ask around, if you want. They’ll definitely have a better idea than me.’

‘That’d be great,’ Beau said. ‘But you know…keep it quiet, yeah? Ask the right people, I mean.’

Keg snorted. ‘You know me, Beau, I’m the quietest chainmail wearing dwarf you’ve ever met.’

Beau grinned. She didn’t _get_ the chainmail, but then, if she worked in a bar that was frequented by werewolves and vampires and creatures that attacked with a bite, then she’d probably try and do something to protect herself as well.

‘You sticking around?’ Keg asked. She gestured around the bar. ‘I’ve got some time, I can ask now.’

‘Sure.’ Beau grabbed a beer and some peanuts, and went and sat in a booth in the corner. The vampires here _tolerated_ her, but they didn’t particularly want to talk to her. Keg was a decent intermediary, and was always happy for the excuse to pick up a favor in return. Beau had done no small number of off-the-books jobs to make up for all the favors she kept racking up in order to get her _actual_ job done. It was the sort of thing that was generally expected, and as long as the off-the-books jobs didn’t include murder, nobody really batted an eye.

Some of the patrons of the bar gave her Looks, but said nothing. Beau wasn’t vindictive, but she had heard stories of Expositors that had overstepped their boundaries, going after creatures that they felt had wronged them in one way or another. Those Expositors typically didn’t last long.

Beau had just finished shelling her last peanut when Keg returned, huffing as she squeezed into the tiny booth. ‘Okay,’ Keg said. She handed the pictures back to Beau, and Beau put them in her pocket. ‘It wasn’t easy, but I found some things out. You were right, there _is_ a new vamp den starting to hook its claws into the underbelly. The vamps here don’t know too much, but apparently they call themselves the followers of the Angel of Irons.’

Beau frowned. The sketch in her pocket – was _that_ the Angel of Irons? Did the mysterious vampire of her dreams finally have a name? She had to admit, it was a pretty sweet name. Very…commanding. Beau was a very big fan of commanding women. That was, women who were commanding.

‘Thanks,’ she said, finally, after a very long and awkward silence. ‘I owe you one.’

‘I’ll put it on your tab.’

Beau said her goodbyes, and left. It was after one, and she _really_ wanted to go and sleep. She started off in the direction of home when something caught her eye.

There was a figure standing on the street corner.

A figure with long, dark hair, and mismatched eyes.

Beau held the angel’s gaze. She half-expected to get another headache, but no…Had the angel been _following_ her? She could have sworn she’d seen her at the vamp bar last night, but had put it down to a trick of the imagination. This, though…this definitely wasn’t Beau’s imagination. She was pretty sure her imagination had a little more…well, creativity.

They looked at each other for a very long time. Beau knew beyond any doubt that the angel knew who she was, knew that she was the person that had interrupted their slaughter of the other vampire den.

Beau hesitated only briefly, before walking towards the angel. The angel didn’t move.

Finally, when Beau was barely thirty feet away, the angel seemed to realize what was happening. She looked around, as though expecting to be followed. It didn’t look like she saw anything that concerned her, though, because she caught Beau’s eye once more, and gestured to the alleyway closest.

Zadash was a city of alleyways. They wended their way through the city, leading to secret bars, and dens of thieves and plunderers. Beau had spent enough time on the streets of Zadash (both for the Soul, and for…other reasons) that she was pretty well acquainted with the alleyways. The one that the angel had gone down split off into two even smaller alleyways, one of which came back out on the next block, the other eventually coming out next to the _Invulnerable Vagrant_. If things went sideways, Beau was reasonably confident that she could flee and not get caught.

Before Beau had even made it halfway there, the angel cried out in pain, and grabbed at the back of her neck. She looked back at Beau almost…scared? Then, she turned and started to run.

‘Wait!’ Beau called out, but the angel was already gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you like the story, please leave a review!


	6. You're such an inspiration for the ways that I will never, ever choose to be

VI-You're such an inspiration for the ways that I will never, ever choose to be

  
  


Beau searched the alleyway, but found no sign of the angel. Typical. Whatever magical vampire/angel bullshit that she’d used to knock Beau out at the vampire den, she’d clearly used again. Maybe.

  
  


That was the thing about monsters. They all had access to weird and different power sets.

  
  


Disappointed, Beau went home. She didn’t know what she would have done if she’d gotten to have a conversation with the angel. Ask about her day, maybe? Beau had never been particularly good at small talk.

  
  


But, at the very least, she had more than what she had started with. She had a name for the group, and she had knowledge of the fact that she was potentially being watched by them. For some reason, this didn’t worry Beau. At least not as much as it should have. Exactly why, though, she wasn’t sure.

  
  


Maybe it was because twice now, the angel had had ample opportunity to kill Beau. In the vampire den, it would have been easy enough for the two of them to slit her throat while she was unconscious. Here, now, Beau was alone and unarmed, her stake gun back at the Cobalt Soul in the weapon’s locker. Judging by those muscles, the angel was clearly strong enough to overpower Beau without even having to tap into any weird magic powers.

  
  


Tonight, Vorsah’s memories were a little more muted. Beau had rarely had dreams that lasted more than a night or two. There were flashes of the people that wandered in and out of the vamp bar, and flashes of a hundred different people, but nothing that Beau really remembered the next morning.

  
  


Grumbling, Beau dragged herself out of bed just after sunrise. She had skipped yesterday’s workout, and she really couldn’t afford to miss another. Her red blood cells were no doubt still a little low, so she did about half the pull-ups she normally would, albeit hanging from the fire escape several stories up. It was something she preferred not to do, given the propensity of her neighbors to call the police, but actually having the energy to leave the apartment and go to the gym was not happening.

  
  


Around one p.m, though, Beau could put it off no longer, and went in. She had no doubt that after the relative quiet of the previous day, there would be a large stack of missions waiting, and she wasn’t wrong. Almost the second she had walked through the doors, a tiny halfling figure in a bright yellow dress had cornered her.

‘Beau!’ Veth had come out of nowhere, and Beau was stuck in between the security gate, and the elevators leading upstairs. She couldn’t avoid Veth without pushing past, which would have been very rude (not that Veth was never rude to her). ‘I need your help.’

  
  


Beau stared at her. ‘Uh...okay?’ she said.

  
  


‘I’ll conveniently forget that I’m mad at you,’ Veth continued, coolly. Beau blinked. _Uh, what?_

  
  


‘Why the fuck are you mad at me?’ Beau hadn’t seen Veth in days, let alone done something to upset her, at least to the best of her knowledge. Of course, Veth was constantly mad at her for no reason. Or very petty reasons, at least.

  
  


‘You got Caleb hurt.’

  
  


_Oh. Yeah, that would have done it._

  
  


Veth and Caleb were the closest people in each other’s lives, to the point where Veth had poisoned Beau’s breakfasts for a week last year when Beau and Caleb had gotten into an argument over a bowl that was turning people into mindless cultists. Beau couldn’t go near the bathrooms on the fifth floor without being hit with a sudden onslaught of horrible memories.

  
  


‘Caleb’s a grown man that can take care of himself,’ Beau said, blithely. In fact, he was probably better than she was at taking care of himself. After all, he was a fully-trained battlemage who could bend reality to his will. Beau could pull a trigger and punch some things, and that was about it. She did feel guilty that Caleb had gotten shot, but not to the point that she blamed herself for it. ‘Anyway, what do you need?’

  
  


‘I have a mission that I need to go on, but I’m not allowed to go without an Expositor.’ Veth sounded very put out by this fact, and Beau didn’t necessarily blame her. The “consultants” at the Cobalt Soul were often far more experienced and far more talented than any of the Expositors. Veth, Fjord and Caleb had all turned down multiple requests for them to become full-time employees of the Soul, the reasons for which they hadn’t bothered to explain. ‘You’re the only one who’s not busy.’

  
  


Beau raised an eyebrow. ‘You really want to lead with that? No, “oh Beau, you’re the greatest, I really need your help, I love you so much”?’

  
  


Veth scoffed. ‘You wouldn’t have believed me if I’d said that,’ she said, which was absolutely true. Veth was a worse liar than even Jester, who had once tried to convince Beau that Red Vines were a vegetable (“Vines are _natural,_ Beau!”). ‘How about this? Come with me on this mission, or I might accidentally break a glass vial containing a very important potion tomorrow.’ There it was. Blackmail was much more Veth’s style. Beau didn’t think – or at least she hoped – that Veth wouldn’t actually smash her potion, but the idea of her flesh slowly rotting away as she cried out for brains was enough of a fear that Beau relented.

  
  


‘Ugh. _Fine_. What are we doing?’ The elevator arrived, and they both got on. Beau jabbed the button for the fifth floor.

  
  


‘I’m out of some components that I need for my potions,’ she said. ‘So we have to go and steal them.’

  
  


It was blunt and to the point, and Beau immediately had questions. ‘Okay…Why are you not buying them? You have a budget, don’t you? You’re like...the whole alchemy department.’

  
  


‘I have a budget,’ Veth agreed. ‘But it’s useless since I was banned from the only decent place in town to buy alchemical ingredients.’

  
  


‘Uh huh. Why are you banned?’

  
  


‘Because I got caught trying to steal owl-bear feathers.’ There it was. Beau wasn’t the least bit surprised. In addition to her alchemical brilliance, Veth had a reputation for having very sticky fingers, and it had nothing to do with all the lollipops Jester kept giving her.

  
  


‘You can break into Pumat’s without batting an eye. Why do you need me?’

  
  


‘Oh, we’re not breaking into Pumat’s,’ Veth told her. ‘We’re breaking into the sanctum of a powerful wizard under the guise of taking him down, and when we’re done, we’re gonna steal his shit! As evidence!’ It took about another five minutes of grilling for Veth to reveal that 1) the wizard in question had been selling Alchemist’s Fire to teenagers, and 2) that Dairon had already approved the mission, with the Expositor contingency. By the time that had all come out, they had exited the elevator, and gone straight to the kitchens. Beau made a very strong cup of coffee. Veth took a quick nip from a small flask that she kept in her jacket.

  
  


‘You should have just led with that, man.’ Half the reason Beau had come to the Soul was because she’d been caught selling illegal shit to the wrong people. This was exactly the kind of mission she thrived on.

  
  


‘Where’s the fun in that?’ It was a fair point. Their relationship was sort of based on reasonable amount of playful (and sometimes not so playful) antagonism. ‘So tell me about this hot angel you’re getting horny over.’

  
  


Beau rolled her eyes. Veth had clearly been talking to Jester. Caleb would never have used a word like “horny,” and as close as he was to Veth, he wasn’t a huge gossip spinner. Jester, on the other hand… ‘I’m not getting horny over her,’ Beau said, simply. ‘I just...I’m curious, y’know?’

  
  


‘Curious about what it’d be like for her to bend you over a table?’

  
  


Well yeah, but Beau wasn’t about to admit that, especially not to Veth. If she did, then the entire Cobalt Soul would know about it before sunrise.

  
  


‘Hey Veth, can you tell me what you see in this photo?’ Beau handed over the other half of the image that she had put in her report. The image with a headache inducing blur.

  
  


Veth snatched the photo from Beau’s hand, and looked at it. ‘Hey, what the fuck!’ The photo dropped to the ground, and Veth put her arm to a suddenly bloody nose. ‘Fuck you!’

  
  


‘ _That’s_ why I’m curious,’ Beau told her. She put the photo back into her pocket. ‘A creature that can fuck someone up with just a blurry photograph...that’s dangerous.’ Dangerous and very, very hot.

  
  


‘Ugh. You’re always so horny.’ Though Beau hadn’t said anything to indicate this, Veth was clearly way better at reading people than Beau had thought.

  
  


‘Coming from Miss “I have sex with my husband twelve times a week.”’

  
  


‘That’s not horny,’ Veth said, reasonably. ‘That’s just a healthy marriage.’

  
  


Beau shook her head. She wasn’t sure how Veth and Yeza only had one kid, and frankly, she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know. ‘So this takedown,’ she said. ‘You have an entry plan?’

  
  


The next hour and a half, Veth appraised Beau of their plan of attack. Come in through the sewers, disable the proximity alarms, ambush the guy while he’s sleeping. That was at least the nuts and bolts of it. Beau hated to admit it, but they usually had vastly better luck going in without a plan than with. That, in addition to the fact that Veth would no doubt bring Caleb along meant that this would hopefully be a cakewalk.

  
  


They went to Caduceus for supplies. The firbolg was busy curing one of the other Expositors; Tubo, Beau was pretty sure his name was. He was a halfling man with skin even darker than Beau’s, and his bare back and chest were both covered in scars. ‘Alright, you’re done,’ Caduceus said, after a few moments. Tubo put his shirt back on. He seemed mildly resigned to see Beau there, which was generally the attitude that most of the other Expositors had towards Beau. She did have a proclivity for...shenanigans.

  
  


‘You don’t need healing already, do you?’ Caduceus frowned, looking over Beau and Veth. ‘It’s not even three o’clock.’ Fair point, Beau did have a tenancy to run most of her missions after nightfall.

  
  


‘Just grabbing some healing kits,’ Veth said, politely. It was layered with no small amount of fear. Veth had been somewhat intimidated by Caduceus ever since the time he’d parted the ocean to stop them getting eaten by piranhas. ‘If that’s alright. We’ve got a big mission tonight.’

  
  


It was alright, apparently. Caduceus also gave Beau a metal fan that he had found while antiquing in the Pentamarket. He was a big fan of antiquing, and always managed to find something cool and obscure. Beau had tried once, and gotten scammed on a headband that was supposed to make her smarter. She wore it anyway, out of principle, but it didn’t make her smarter any more than her shoes made her run faster.

  
  


‘Thanks, Deucy,’ Beau grinned. She made to open the fan, but Caduceus held up a hand.

  
  


‘Whoah, whoah,’ he said. ‘I definitely wouldn’t do that in here. Maybe only point it towards someone you don’t like.’ Beau was definitely intrigued by that, and almost disappointed when she didn’t get a chance to use it later that night.

  
  


They got in through the sewers no trouble, but were almost immediately set upon by guard ghouls with rotting gray flesh, and dislocated jaws. Beau took a claw swipe across the face, before Caleb did what Caleb always did, and set everything on fire. They just about managed to pin down and handcuff the alchemist, and grab all the “evidence” that Veth needed, before the place went up in flames.

  
  


‘ _Entshuldigung,_ ’ Caleb muttered. Beneath the ash, he looked very pale. ‘I may, ah...I may have overdone it.’ There was a joke in there about steak and flame grilling, but Beau decided that it wasn’t the time. She was mostly disappointed that she hadn’t gotten to use the fan.

  
  


‘No sweat man.’ Beau clapped Caleb on the shoulder, forgetting that she had stopped herself from doing exactly that only forty-eight hours earlier, on account of the still-healing bullet wound in Caleb’s shoulder. ‘Sorry.’

  
  


‘Be careful!’ Veth chastised her. The halfling’s arms were overflowing with bottles. This, frankly, was not something that Beau particularly wanted to deal with for the rest of the night. She took a look at the alchemist. He was bleeding in half a dozen different places, including from where Beau had punched him in the face. The handcuffs on his wrists were engraved with runes that were, ostensibly, supposed to stop him from casting spells, but even then, they had put the standard issue mage collar on, which meant he couldn’t speak.

  
  


‘You got this?’ Beau asked. ‘I might take a walk, clear my head.’ She signed off on the arrest papers that Caleb had dutifully pre-prepared, and shoved them in one of Veth’s outer pockets. Then, since it would be a very bad idea to take it with her where she was planning on going, she handed her stake gun to Caleb. He gave her a shrewd sort of look, but said nothing.

  
  


‘If he tries to run, I’ll shoot him!’ Veth gestured to the holstered gun on her hip. ‘Then I’ll shoot him again for making me drop all this stuff!’

  
  


Caleb, at least, Beau trusted to get the alchemist back. He inscribed his signature fiery circle in the brick wall behind them, and jumped through with Veth and their prisoner. Beau watched as the portal closed in front of her, like paper burning in reverse.

  
  


She started to walk. Caleb had done a pretty good job cleaning up the claw marks across her face, but they would probably scar. If she had gone back with them, then Jester could have taken a look, but then Beau would have had to admit that she’d tried to backflip off of a wall to kick a ghoul in the face and missed, which had led to the “getting slashed across the face” part. Not the most auspicious of battles.

  
  


Out in the street, it was busy. Even at midnight, Zadash didn’t really sleep. It wasn’t as busy as the daytime, but still, there were no shortage of people milling around, going to bars, and clubs, walking down the street singing loudly...Especially given that this was one of the shadier nightlife districts. A shady nightlife district that Beau was very, very familiar with.

  
  


It was half the reason that she had wanted to walk back. Had to burn that adrenaline off somehow.

  
  


It didn’t take Beau long to realize that she was being followed, and it didn’t take her much longer after that to realize that she knew exactly who was following her. A six-foot tall, muscular woman with long, braided hair kind of stood out in the crowd.

  
  


Beau was feeling...she was feeling kind of daring. She decided to do something that was either very stupid, or...actually, no, that was it. It was just very stupid. She found the very next vamp bar on the block, and walked right inside. She took a green wristband from the security guard inside, and went to sit down at the bar.

  
  


Two minutes later, the angel joined her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for the delays, my laptop is undergoing repairs, and it's so weird writing on a different one. Please leave a review if you're enjoying the story.


	7. Desperate and ravenous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild smut in this chapter :)

VII-Desperate and ravenous

Beau ordered a very large beer, and after a moment’s thought, ordered a second one. The second one, she slid across to the angel, who hadn’t said anything yet. Beau couldn’t quite bring herself to look. Would her eyes start bleeding, if she stared for too long?

  
  


‘You’ve been following me,’ she said, finally. It wasn’t a question. It was way too much of a coincidence for the angel to have been hanging around the past two nights in exactly the same spot that Beau happened to be.

  
  


‘I….did not think it was that obvious.’ Beau was taken aback. She hadn’t expected the angel’s voice to be so soft, and yet it was. Soft, and somehow layered with half a dozen different emotions at once. Sadness, and nervousness, and…fear? Why would she possibly be afraid? Who could someone so godsdamned powerful be afraid _of_.

  
  


Beau finally turned to look, and the angel was just as beautiful up close as she had been from a distance. There was a beat of silence while Beau waited to see if she got a nosebleed from looking into those eyes.

  
  


Nothing happened.

  
  


Okay, that wasn’t strictly true. What happened was that Beau stared, and took in the green-blue and purple eyes, rimmed with eyeliner, and the long, braided hair fading from black into white, and the full, soft lips…She imagined those lips pressed against hers. Maybe pressed in a few other places, too.

  
  


‘Do you want…’ Beau gestured towards a booth at the back. There were a lot of questions she wanted to ask, and it felt very weird to be asking them sitting at the bar, where anyone could hear them. There was, of course, an unwritten code of silence in places like this. It was frowned upon to listen in on other people’s conversations, but that didn’t mean that people didn’t do it. Beau had heard a lot of weird shit in these places.

  
  


The booths were designed to sit two side by side, and Beau wedged herself in awkwardly, with the angel following. Too late, Beau considered that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have trapped herself like this, but even if she had been scared, she couldn’t see the angel doing anything to hurt her in a place like this.

  
  


On the off chance it did happen...well, that was what security was for.

  
  


‘Can I…’ The angel put a hand to Beau’s cheek. Beau hadn’t been expecting it, and flinched slightly. The angel’s hand was warmer than she had expected, like a tiefling’s. Beau couldn’t help but lean into the touch, now that it was there, and was reward with a soft warm glow against her cheek, and the unmistakable sensation of healing magic pulsing through her. Though she couldn’t see them, she knew the cuts on her face had disappeared.

  
  


‘Dope,’ Beau said, before she could stop herself, and the angel gave a soft sort of chuckle. Beau could see tiny fangs next to her incisors. Bigger than human canines, but smaller than most other vampire fangs that Beau had seen. ‘Is that an angel thing, or a vampire thing, or a cleric thing?’

  
  


The angel’s eyes widened. ‘I...you know what I am?’ she asked. Being a cleric wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary, and admittedly, neither was being a vampire. So an angel thing then. ‘Does it bother you?’

  
  


Beau was half incredulous. How could it _bother_ her? Then, she remembered where she worked, the sort of things she did for a living. If the Cobalt Soul had thought that there were angels running amok, then it didn’t matter what Beau thought.

  
  


‘No, it doesn’t bother me,’ she said. ‘Does it...are there more like you?’ Keg had said the group followed someone called the “Angel of Irons”. Beau wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t think that this woman was the Angel of Irons. She had a very...gravitational presence, but not in the way of generals, or asshole High Curators.

  
  


‘I…’ The angel didn’t seem to know how to answer the question. ‘In my group, there are more of us, yes. My bro—my friend, Molly.’ Molly, Beau wondered if that was the tiefling vampire she had seen. ‘You saw him.’ Apparently, yes. ‘And then Jourrael, and the Hand.’ She looked at Beau, suddenly suspicious. ‘Why are you asking? Are you going to tell _them_?’

  
  


Them, meaning the Soul, Beau was pretty sure. The angel had definitely been following her, then, if she knew about the Soul. ‘If I told them, I’d have to tell them where I got that information,’ Beau said. Technically not a lie, but not really the whole truth, either. The angel seemed to take her words at face value. Beau felt like kind of a dick. ‘Is there someone you’re scared of?’ Beau asked. ‘Someone who might not want other people messing in their business?’

  
  


_That_ sparked a reaction. Any fear that might have been in the angel’s eyes before had increased tenfold. ‘He would not like me talking to you.’ Beau wondered who _he_ was, but the angel was jumpy enough that she didn’t feel comfortable pushing. If she went too far, then the angel was likely to flee.

  
  


‘I don’t think he’ll come looking for you _here_ ,’ Beau said, nodding to their surroundings. It was definitely not the sort of place where auspicious things happened. ‘And even if he does, I won’t let him hurt you.’ She gave a half sort of wink. Even though Beau didn’t know a damn thing about the “he” the angel was talking about, she was pretty sure it wasn’t the sort of person that she could take on unarmed an alone, no matter how many times she hit the gym.

  
  


The angel started, as though she had only just realized _where_ they were. Definitely not the classiest place for a meet-cute, but then, Beau wasn’t exactly looking for an ever-after.

  
  


‘Do you come to these places a lot?’ the angel asked. It wouldn’t have been unheard of to go straight to the back rooms, but Beau wanted to give a little bit of credence to the idea that they were on a very sleazy date. The minimum amount of decorum was expected.

  
  


‘Honestly,’ Beau said, ‘Yes.’

  
  


‘That seems…’ The angel seemed to consider her words. ‘I would not have expected someone in your line of work to befriend a lot of vampires.’

  
  


Beau almost choked on her drink. ‘Not a lot of befriending going on, to be honest. Lots of one-night-stands.’ She had befriended a couple of vampires, mostly for the purposes of information gathering, though. Friendships in general were not something that her schedule allowed for. Almost all of her friends were either colleagues, or informants. The one-night-stands were a lot easier to deal with.

  
  


‘That sounds lonely.’

  
  


The words hit Beau with all the force of a sledgehammer. She’d never even really considered how lonely it actually was, going to a different bar every night to hook up with a vampire, never making any lasting connections. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I guess it is.’

  
  


She’d always sort of used sex as a Band-Aid, even before she’d spent her time researching and hunting down society’s most horrifying creatures. Before Vorsah, there had been Keg, and Reani, and Tori, and a dozen others whose names she had either not bothered to get, or couldn’t remember.

  
  


Why should this vampire be any different?

  
  


Beau leaned in slowly, making her intentions clear. She put her hand to the angel’s cheek. It was always weird to not hear a heartbeat. ‘I love your eyes,’ she murmured.

  
  


The angel blinked. ‘I…your eyes are also very beautiful. Can I…can I kiss you?’ Weirdly polite, for a vampire, even one that was also an angel.

  
  


‘Honestly, I’m hoping you’ll do a lot more than that,’ Beau said. There was a beat of silence, before the angel stood. She didn’t even hesitate before taking Beau by the arm, and leading her to one of the back rooms.

  
  


The first touch of those lips against hers was like a fucking dream come true. The angel kiss hungrily, almost _angrily_ , if Beau were to put an emotion to it. There was such fervor, such intensity, that Beau was half sure she was about to get her neck ripped out.

  
  


But the angel didn’t seem interested in ripping Beau’s throat out. She was far more interested in putting her hand up Beau’s shirt, and finding her breast. Beau leaned into it. This was what she was all about. She found herself getting pushed backwards. ‘Take off your shirt,’ the angel said, and Beau hastened to obey. She was delighted to see that the angel was taking off her own shirt, and was very tempted to just stop and watch.

  
  


If Beau hadn’t seen the wings, she was sure she would have thought of this woman as an angel anyway. Her skin was paler than Beau had ever seen on a human, perfectly sculpted muscles. Beau kind of (absolutely) wanted this woman to shove Beau against a wall and do dirty things to her.

  
  


She had maybe sort of expected a more...well, something more along the lines of what she had been reading in all of those library books. Angels with six heads, and three pairs of wings. Sadly, this particular angel was lacking in any extra appendages beneath her clothes. Beau was kinda disappointed.

  
  


She was not disappointed, however, by everything else that she saw. The thick, rippling muscle of her arms was present everywhere. Beau kind of just stared for about thirty seconds, trying to convince herself that this wasn’t a dream.

  
  


‘Are you alright?’ the angel asked, and the shining light seemed to fade a little, and Beau saw that same nervousness that she had when the angel had first started to speak.

  
  


‘I...yeah.’ Beau tore her gaze away from the angel’s body. If anything had given her a nosebleed, it would have been that.

  
  


It was…quick.

  
  


Quick, and, Beau was sure, cathartic for both of them. But if Dairon ever found out, if _anyone_ from the Soul found out, her life was worse than forfeit. For all that the angel was soft, she had been surprisingly forceful, and maybe a little too receptive to the fact that Beau mostly just wanted to be fucked into oblivion. The fact that her legs (and really, most of the lower half of her body) had gone kind of numb was an added bonus. 

  
  


Beau wiped her face with one of the complimentary towels, and she could see the angel doing the same to her right hand.

  
  


‘My name—’ The angel started. Beau held up a hand.

  
  


‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Plausible deniability. If I don’t know your name, then I haven’t gotten too close, right?’ If she didn’t know the angel’s name, then she didn’t have to put it in a report. ‘He won’t find out you’ve told me anything.’

  
  


From the look in the angel’s eyes, she didn’t entirely understand, but she still said, ‘Right…’

  
  


Beau bit her lip. ‘Let me put it this way,’ she said. ‘Would your people—’ The angel winced, and Beau filed that one away for later. ‘—Would they be pleased, or angry if you told them that you hooked up with a person who hunts vampires for a living?’

  
  


‘Oh.’ The angel looked…disappointed. Anyway, it wasn’t as though Beau was ever going to see her again. If she was smart, then she would avoid the vamp bars for a week or two, and then go back to her old habits of never going to the same one more than once. But then, no-one had ever accused Beau of being smart.

  
  


‘Thanks for the drink,’ Beau said, and forced herself to leave, before she changed her mind. There was something beyond curiosity, and beyond the pretty good sex that made her want to stay, but that way lay madness, and it was definitely not a rabbit hole that Beau wanted to throw herself down. Her life was already fucked up enough without throwing sleeping with the enemy into the mix.

  
  


Despite desperately wanting to, Beau didn’t look back.

  
  


It was well after two in the morning when she made it home, exhausted, but somehow also elated. The bright city lights pierced in through the windows, and even this far up, she could hear the sound of cars, and horns, and a still-bustling city.

  
  


She lay awake until the sun had almost risen, and it wasn’t until she’d just about drifted off to sleep that she realized that the angel hadn’t even bitten her.


	8. Tilling my own grave to keep me level

VIII - Tilling my own grave to keep me level

Beau tried to stay away.

  
  


She really did.

  
  


She did the dutiful Expositor thing, and wrote down all the names that the angel told her that she could remember; Molly, and Jourrael, and...the Hand? Plus, an ominous “he” that could have been anyone. Was this the mysterious leader of the vampire den?

  
  


True to her word, though, Beau didn’t keep any of this research at the Soul. She made a crazy person pin-board, on the crumbling drywall above her desk. Maybe not telling anyone was a very bad idea (okay, it was definitely a bad idea), but at least if anything happened, then someone would probably come take a look at her apartment. The tiefling, she was pretty sure, was Molly. She stuck his photo next to the name on the wall. The angel, she literally just kept as “the angel.” Any name she was sure would somehow feel wrong, or inadequate. “The angel”...well, it suited her.

  
  


It’d really suck if her name turned out to be Traci, or something. Something...prosaic.

  
  


Jourrael sounded like a name that had some history attached to it, and Beau spent the next few days in the library, trying to figure out the significance of it.

  
  


All she found was a single, tiny thread that once she started to pull it, led to half a dozen other things. Jourrael, also known as the Inevitable End, also known as the Caeodogist. Chosen assassin of Lolth.

  
  


Lolth, as in the fucking Betrayer God.

  
  


It couldn’t have been the same Jourrael. Well, more to the point, Beau desperately _hoped_ that it wasn’t the same Jourrael. That would change...well, it would change everything. Beau definitely couldn’t justify going around banging an angel if that angel had a connection to one of the most evil creatures that had ever existed.

  
  


The Gods were one of those conversation topics that all too often got brushed to the side. It seemed common knowledge that they existed, but then, science also existed, and they worked in a weird sort of harmony that people pretended to understand. Caduceus, for example, was a devout worshiper of the Wildmother. Jester followed a God that no-one had heard of (and who Beau had serious, serious doubts about). The Dwendalian Empire had strict rules about which Gods were allowed to be worshiped, rules that were routinely ignored and derided by the majority of the Empire’s citizens.

  
  


The exception, of course, was the Betrayer Gods. Being of course, that the Betrayer Gods were evil as fuck, and the people that tended to worship them tended to be not great people. That wasn’t to say that there weren’t bad people following other Gods. Beau had once worked on a case where followers of Pelor had become corrupted with power and attempted to murder anyone that strayed from his teachings in any way.

  
  


Reading about Lolth send Beau down an entirely different rabbit-hole, reading about the Betrayer Gods. It was a small chance, but a lot of the vampire dens _did_ worship Betrayer Gods.

  
  


By happenstance, she flipped to a page with a familiar looking symbol. Tharizdun, the Chained Oblivion. A seven-pointed star made of iron chains. Tharizdun was said to be trapped, unable to hold sway over this world. Something about that symbol called to Beau, and she wasn’t entirely sure why.

  
  


‘You haven’t heard of the “Angel of Irons,” have you?’ Beau asked Caleb, later that night. He was doing the thing that Beau had so conveniently forgotten to do, writing his report about what had happened with the alchemist the previous night. There wasn’t much to write, in all honesty. If not for the fact that she knew Caleb would put it in his, Beau wouldn’t have even mentioned getting sliced across the face.

  
  


Caleb frowned, thinking. ‘Ah, _nein_ ,’ he said. ‘I have not heard of them.’ Beau let out a disappointed breath she didn’t know she was holding. Caleb seemed to know a lot of things about some very narrow subject areas.

  
  


It was a frustrating sort of dead end. Beau had one idea that she could work with to try and get more information, but it was a very, very bad one. Like, would probably get her ass reamed by Dairon, bad.

  
  


She went back to the vamp bars.

  
  


It took a few nights, but she had gotten the feeling that the angel hadn’t been fully satisfied by their single encounter. Sure enough, after three nights, and three different vamp bars, Beau saw her again. She looked very nervous. As though she was afraid someone was following her.

  
  


Funny, that.

  
  


‘You miss me?’ Beau asked, when the angel sat down next to her. The question had been intended in jest, so she was kind of surprised, when the angel said:

  
  


‘Yes.’

  
  


Beau grinned. ‘That’s how it always goes.’ The angel chuckled lightly, but her eyes did not quite meet Beau’s. Her right hand was rubbing at the back of her neck, as though there was a mark that she was trying to rub off.

  
  


Beau bought her a beer, but she didn’t drink it.

  
  


In fact, she seemed utterly distracted. Beau wondered if her boss, whoever he was, was giving her grief about something. It wasn’t unheard of in vamp dens, for the more senior vampires to take the hierarchy too seriously, especially if they’d been around for a long time. Whatever senior vampire was old enough to be comfortable giving orders to an angel had to be pretty fucking powerful. She was picking her fingernails, and seemed to jump at every minor noise.

  
  


‘Is everything okay?’ Beau reached out, and put a hand on top of the angel’s. She started slightly, but then relaxed, and leaned into Beau’s touch.

  
  


‘I...I should not be here. He would not like it.’

  
  


Beau wondered, then, if the reason she hadn’t seen the angel the first two nights, was because she’d been working up the courage. ‘Who is he?’ Beau asked, and the angel shook her head. ‘You don’t….I mean, if you’re scared of him, I can help you. Come in with me, and the Cobalt Soul can protect you.’ Okay, she wasn’t entirely sure if Dairon would go for that, but if the angel could be convinced to go against her master, then they had a very definite in, and a very definite source of information.

  
  


‘I—You cannot protect me from him.’

  
  


‘I mean, come on, have you seen these muscles?’ Beau made a show of flexing her biceps, which were much, much smaller than the angel’s. That, at least, earned her a smile.

  
  


‘They are very nice biceps.’ The angel’s eyes were fixed onto Beau’s arms. Even with her jacket on, you could sort of see the muscle there.

  
  


‘Want to touch them some more?’ Not the most overt come-on Beau had ever given. That prize went to the time she had, many, many drinks in, walked up to a stranger at the bar, and offered a trip out into the alleyway. It had surprisingly worked, and had had the added consequence (or maybe reward) of creeping out Fjord.

  
  


A slight hesitation, and then:

  
  


‘Yes.’

  
  


They went to the back room.

  
  


As little formality that had been there the first time, there was even less of it this time. The angel slammed Beau against the wall, plunged three fingers into her without even any preamble the moment Beau’s clothes hit the floor. It was the roughest anyone had ever taken her, and not only did Beau revel in it, she yearned for it. In dominating her, using her, the angel seemed far more confident, far less terrified.

  
  


‘Bite me,’ Beau murmured, and the angel didn’t think twice before diving in, and piercing the skin of Beau’s throat. Too late, Beau realized that she had forgotten to offer her chest, or some other hidden area to be drunk from. Oh well. She could always wear a scarf. That wouldn’t be suspicious at all.

  
  


Beau dropped to her knees, and the angel pulled her in close, not letting go until after her thighs had finished shaking. The angel’s eyes were wet with tears.

  
  


‘If you want….’ Beau started, and then stopped. ‘Just remember what I said, okay? If you feel like you want to get away from him, I promise we can help you.’ The angel looked conflicted, and Beau didn’t blame her. At the very least, she was distracted enough that when they’d both redressed and cleaned up, when the angel made a very quick escape, she didn’t look back to see if anyone was following her.

  
  


Beau had prepared for this. She turned her jacket inside out, put the hood up, and put on her sunglasses. There were enough tweakers around that wore sunglasses at night to protect themselves from the bright, neon lights. With any luck, she’d be mistaken for just another desperate addict. It was a big problem in this part of town, and more than once, Beau had purposefully been a little too slow on the uptake to take in a teenager that was clearly being manipulated by people much more powerful. She kept a stack of business cards in her pocket for Reani, who was a social worker, and who spent a lot of time helping people like that get back on their feet.

  
  


Somehow, Beau thought that the angel’s problems were a little beyond Reani’s purview.

  
  


The angel walked through the streets, and Beau followed quietly. She was generally pretty good at being sneaky, and she had lived in Zadash long enough to have an idea of where the angel was going. She was heading in the direction of the Tri-Spires.

  
  


That...that was surprising. The Tri-Spires were renowned for being...well, being the snootier part of town. The only person that Beau knew who lived there was Jester, and Beau remembered Caleb telling her a story about how the police had escorted him out of the neighborhood for being under-dressed, once. Of course, for Caleb “under-dressed” potentially meant that he was still partially on fire.

  
  


They were still half a mile from the Tri-Spires when the angel turned into an alleyway. Beau slowed down slightly; she didn’t want to get too close when there was no-one between her and the angel.

  
  


She had to stop almost immediately after stepping into the alley. The angel was standing in shadow, staring back at her.

  
  


‘No,’ the angel murmured. ‘No, why did you follow me?’ She sounded desperate. She sounded afraid. Then, all of a sudden, it was like someone flipped a switch. Beau took a step forward.

  
  


The angel’s eyes were distant, and when she looked at Beau, there was no trace of recognition.

  
  


‘What’s wrong?’ Beau’s words fell on deaf ears. Either someone had done something to the angel, or…or something.

  
  


‘I’m sorry,’ the angel said. ‘I can’t…I can’t fight him.’ There were tears pressing at the corner of her eyes, and yet still no sign that the angel had ever even seen Beau before. It was almost as though she was fighting against some kind of mind control.

  
  


‘I can help you,’ Beau said. She _needed_ the angel to listen. If she couldn’t help the angel, then how could she ever help herself? She took another step forward, and put a gentle hand on the angel’s shoulder. ‘I can help you,’ she said again.

  
  


The angel looked her in the eyes. Green-blue and purple now almost looked as though they were glowing red. The angel straightened, and for half a second, Beau saw a flash of the blurry image she had first seen in a photograph. The voice, when it came, could shatter glass.

  
  


‘No,’ the angel said.

  
  


Beau felt a sharp, wet pain in her gut. She looked down and saw a dagger sticking out of it, the angel’s hand wrapped around the hilt. ‘What?’

  
  


The angel pulled the dagger out, and plunged it in again. Beau dropped to her knees, hands clutching at the blood that was spilling from her body as she tried to stop it. It slipped through her fingers like clouds of smoke. The angel's face was...impassive.

  
  


The only thought that was running through Beau’s head was:

  
  


_Fuck._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...
> 
> Sorry.


	9. The eyes of a fallen angel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has...violence, and introspection, and non-consensual blood drinking.

IX – The eyes of a fallen angel  
  
  


Beau couldn’t move.

  
  


She was still lying there in the alleyway, but her body did not respond to any of the commands she sent it. It was stupid. She spent so much of her life working on her stupid body, and now it was fucking failing her. Dairon would have been pissed.

  
  


Of course, there were _other_ reasons that Dairon might have been pissed, but that hardly seemed important right now.

  
  


Beau couldn’t stop the angel from picking her up.

  
  


There was a weird, primal part of her that was utterly reveling in the fact that a strong, beautiful woman was carrying her, albeit a strong, beautiful woman that had just stabbed her in the stomach twice, no matter how sorry she had seemed.

  
  


Beau tried to cry out, but couldn’t.

  
  


Things were blurry for a little while after that. Beau could tell that she was being moved somewhere, but she was caught in that liminal state between consciousness and unconsciousness. Or maybe between life and death. It was, sadly, not the first, or even the second or third or fourth time she’d been so close to death.

  
  


Beau had been seven years old the first time she’d almost died. She had been exploring the woods near her house, trekking perhaps a little further than was smart, and had fallen from a tree that she had climbed. She remembered lying there, in the muck with a broken arm, knowing that she was going to die. It had taken until after nightfall until someone found her, and it wasn’t until much, much later in life that Beau realized her parents hadn’t even noticed she was missing. If she’d had any preconceived notion that they’d actually cared, it had all but disappeared.

  
  


The only time her parents truly paid any attention was when she did something that went against their wishes. Even her mother, who had, on the whole, been the warmer of the two (though that wasn’t saying much), had been very hands off when it came to caring. The nannies dealt with the day to day care, and Beau’s father handled discipline.

  
  


If only they could have seen her now, praying to any God that would listen for her life. Not because she thought that it was worth anything, but because...well, this couldn’t be all that there was.

  
  


In public, the people of Kamordah tended towards worshiping the Dawnfather. Once a week on Da’leysen, Beau had been forced under threat of punishment to put on a yellow dress, and attend the chapel, paying tithes, and praying for a good harvest.

  
  


In private, most of the citizens kept very small shrines, or hidden symbols of the Wildmother. It wasn’t until she’d been old enough to start trading in secrets that Beau had learned of it. Her own father kept a jade symbol of a shepherd’s crook encircled in wheat, tucked away in his sock drawer. After she’d been kicked out of home, Beau had strongly considered turning him in to the Kamordah Police, but then, she couldn’t justify having contributed to such a corrupt system. Instead, she stolen one of his shipments, and had spent three months in juvie as a result. They’d let her out on the condition that she find meaningful employment.

  
  


She was a long way from that angry, hotheaded kid, but now, bleeding to death in the captivity of the enemy wasn’t exactly auspicious circumstances. Beau let out a moan, the only kind of movement or sound she could even muster.

  
  


‘I’m sorry.’ The voice was soft, and very far away. That angel thing felt really fucking literal right about now. A cold, distant, otherworldly figure escorting Beau to an afterlife she wasn’t sure she deserved.

  
  


On the whole, not a great way to go. An exile from this life, from everything she had worked to achieve. More than she could have imagined, and yet somehow lesser than she knew she should have been capable of.

  
  


That was her father’s voice. _You could be so much better, Beauregard, if you just applied yourself. You could be so much better if only you were stripped of your identity, and molded in my own image. You could be so much better if…if…if you were someone else._

  
  


And maybe that was why she had been so enthralled at the idea of someone following her, seeking her out, wanting to know more about her. Enthralled at the idea that someone in the world had considered her important enough to risk themselves to even just talk to her.

  
  


How could she have been so stupid?

  
  


Going around to the shadiest places in Zadash, and hooking up with even shadier people. Fjord had always said it was going to bite her in the ass (“Fjord, it’s already bitten me in the ass, multiple times a week, to my great satisfaction.” “Why the _fuck_ would you tell me that?”). This, she guessed, was her punishment. Her consequence.

  
  


Maybe, just maybe, they would give her a nice funeral. Blue flowers, probably. Everyone would wear black, except Jester, who would wear pink, and Beau would have loved her for it. Maybe people would even cry. She liked to think that she’d at least had a little bit of an impact on their lives. When they lowered her into the ground, Beau would leave the world knowing that maybe she had had the slightest bit of an impact.

  
  


Beau felt a strange, coppery taste in her mouth that she immediately recognized as blood. She had been punched in the face far too often not to recognize it. It was another thirty seconds or so before she realized that it wasn’t her blood. Another five seconds after that, before she felt the soft flesh against her lips.

  
  


Someone (the angel?) was feeding her. Someone was trying to make sure she didn’t die. The irony of that was...well, Beau thought it was irony, anyway. She was better at the nitty gritty of learning languages than the weird metaphorical discourse. But it seemed strange that the angel had tried to kill her, and was now trying to stop her from dying. As though this fucked up relationship hadn’t been weird enough already. Or, maybe the angel was trying to turn her.

  
  


The science of turning was one of those things that fascinated Beau. She didn’t understand it in the slightest; how feeding from a vampire was something that somehow turned you into one. Something about the virus getting absorbed into the bloodstream, maybe? Caleb would probably know, and Beau had never bothered to ask him about it. It was a moot point anyway; though she didn’t understand it, the doctors (Caduceus, mostly) had already told her that it was highly unlikely that she’d ever be able to be turned. The human body could only handle a single kind of undead virus at a time, and Beau already had one.

  
  


Whether or not they would both sort of mill around inside of her and fight to the death, well, that one would be fun to find out.

  
  


The world seemed to come into clarity, for a moment. Through blurry eyes, Beau could see high ceilings and stained glass windows. There were no small number of temples in Zadash that had stained glass windows; temple to Bahamut, and Erathis, and the Raven Queen. She couldn’t pick out the details, so it could have been any one of them.

  
  


Around her, voices were murmuring. The angel’s voice was like the first crunch of feet on snow, crisp and clear, and yet none of the words pierced her consciousness.

  
  


‘Wake up,’ a voice said. A different voice. A harsher, yet strangely charismatic voice. It shattered her haze like a sledgehammer. Beau couldn’t help but obey.

  
  


She opened her eyes, and found herself face to face with the devil.

  
  


Or at the very least, something a lot like the devil. He had red skin, and red horns, and large red wings. A red tail curled out from beneath the jacket of a very expensive looking suit.

  
  


‘Look at what the Orphanmaker has brought me,’ he said, smugly. ‘ _Dinner_.’ He leaned in, and took a long sniff. Beau tried to push him away, to lash out with her hands, her elbows, her feet, but her body was beyond broken, her mind utterly enthralled. The devil opened his mouth wide, and she felt teeth sharper than the angel’s pierce her collarbone. Beau couldn’t help but let out a scream. She was nothing if not a masochist, but not about this sort of pain. This was beyond agony, beyond anything. This was her very life essence being ripped from her. Whatever was left of her life essence, anyway.

  
  


Sharp claws pierced her side, dragged down her torso. He was toying with her. Playing with his food before he ate it. Beau could feel the tears flowing from her eyes, but as with the rest of her body, she couldn’t control it.

  
  


The red devil laughed. He flexed his wings, back and forth. Blood dripped from his mouth, but he didn’t seem to care. ‘A little bland for my taste,’ he said. ‘But then, humans always are.’ He looked to the corner of the room, and Beau was vaguely aware of two blurred figures. One purple and horned. One tall and pale. The angel. ‘Molly, Yasha,’ he said, beckoning them over. ‘You can deal with her.’

  
  


Beau did not quite comprehend that her death warrant had just been signed. Her heart was beating a million times a minute, flowing from the wounds at her neck, at her shoulder, at her stomach. To a hungry vampire, it was basically a lunch bell.

  
  


The red devil left, and Beau was lying in a pool of her own blood. There was a strange yet distant thought in her head. The thought she was about to die.

  
  


Of all the times she had almost died, this one felt different. There was no-one here to pull her to safety at the last second, no-one to heal her, or to fight off the two vampires that were about to drain her dry.

  
  


This was it.

  
  


Beau stared up into a mesmerizing pair of purple and green-blue eyes, as the angel knelt by her side. They were seemingly transfixed. Cold hands touched her cheek.

  
  


‘Yasha,’ said the other voice. The distant voice. Those eyes didn’t waver.

  
  


Beau’s soft laugh turned into a cough, and she felt blood splatter across her chin.

  
  


_Yasha_ , she thought.

  
  


What a pretty name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, POV shift!
> 
> All remaining chapters will take place from the POV of Dairon, as they complete all the paperwork required after an agent gets kidnapped by vampires.


	10. Your halo slipping down to choke you now

X- Your halo slipping down to choke you now

When Yasha came back to control of her body, she was standing in the Cathedral.

  
  


She should have been used to it by now. Obann’s control was intermittent; for the most part, she could go about her business without him paying her any mind, but if he sensed her wavering to much, then he pulled on the reins.

  
  


She had perhaps been wavering a little more than normal, recently. He couldn’t read her mind, but he could tell, she knew, that Yasha’s thoughts were straying more and more out from under his sway.

  
  


It had started with a pair of bright blue eyes, a clear sky on a summer’s day.

  
  


She had seen them peering through a door, camera in hand, what felt like years ago, but was only a couple of weeks. The eyes had gone blank when Molly had charmed her, robbing Yasha of the chance to look into them further, but they had intrigued her enough that she had to know more. Had to find the woman again.

  
  


She regretted that now, as the awareness slowly trickled in, and she realized that she was covered in blood. There was a vague memory, shrouded in that strange, blurry filter that her mind got when she was under his control. It was a memory of a knife in her hand, stabbing.

  
  


Yasha’s hands shook.

  
  


‘You with us again?’ Molly’s voice was a murmur. He put a hand to her shoulder. If it was anyone else, Yasha would have lashed out, but Molly...Molly grounded her. He was the tether that stopped Yasha from flying away. Without Molly, Yasha definitely wouldn’t have survived this long under Obann’s thumb. She would have lost her mind years ago.

  
  


‘I don’t like it when that happens,’ Yasha could not open her eyes. If she opened them, then she would see what she had done, and even though she knew that it was bad, maybe, just maybe…

  
  


‘Well, he’s fed now, so you might be alright for a while.’ The casualness of Molly’s tone hit hammer with the weight of a thousands stars.

  
  


Yasha opened her eyes.

  
  


The blood was spread across her stomach and arms, from carrying the woman here. There was so much of it, and yet Yasha could still hear the faintest heartbeat coming from the body that Obann had unceremoniously dumped on the floor.

  
  


The wounds were not just from the knife. Obann had taken his fill, judging by the bite marks on the shoulder, and the neck, and various other places. He also hadn’t been very careful with his claws. There were parallel slices through the woman’s stomach where he had nearly eviscerated her. He had taken his fill, and then left, not even asking why Yasha had brought her here. The questions would come later, she assumed.

  
  


Yasha knelt by the woman, and put a hand to her chest. Suddenly, her eyes opened. Bright blue, and the most beautiful thing that Yasha had ever seen.

  
  


The woman was on death’s door. Her blood had spread like spilled water across the ground. It was a miracle that she was still breathing, let alone conscious.

  
  


‘Yasha,’ Molly said. It was a warning, Yasha knew. A warning of what would happen if she didn’t follow Obann’s orders. She knew, of course. She had been subject to the devil’s wrath a hundred times before. It would have been so easy to break away, to strike out on her own, but she couldn’t.

  
  


She owed him.

  
  


He had pulled her from the very depths of her depravity, and given her purpose, had introduced her to Molly.

  
  


‘He said take care of her,’ Yasha said. She did not tear her eyes away from the woman’s. That piercing, bright blue, that seemed so very far away. She might have been still conscious, but Yasha didn’t think that she was aware at all, even if her cheeks were wet with tears.

  
  


‘You know what that means. It doesn’t mean take her out to dinner, it means tear her throat out, and dump her in the river. Come on, Yasha.’ He paused. ‘We’ve done this before.’ They had done this before. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand times before. Why should this one be any different?

  
  


Almost unconsciously, Yasha’s hand stroked the woman’s cheek. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. The woman coughed, and a bloody spittle came out, landing on her chin. Yasha automatically took a corner of her jacket, and wiped it away.

  
  


The woman’s eyes rolled backwards in her head, and in that moment, Yasha made her decision. She picked up the limp body in her arms, and stared down Molly.

  
  


‘I will take care of it,’ she said.

  
  


…

Yasha did not have any idea of what to do. The hospital was very far away, and it was clear to her that the woman would not make it that long. Even now, her heartbeat was slowing at an agonizing rate. Without looking down, Yasha bit her wrist, and put it to the woman’s mouth. She would have to be careful; if she gave too much blood, then there was a chance the woman would turn.

  
  


There was a not so small part of Yasha that considered that option. That was one surefire way that the woman would survive. Turning someone, though; that was a big commitment. It forged an unbreakable sort of bond that not everyone could handle. The last thing Yasha wanted to do was force someone into a position of weakness under her. She had heard stories of that, of younger vampires growing resentful of the ones that had turned them, throwing themselves into the sunlight rather than dealing with everything that followed.

  
  


If it was a choice between turning the woman, though, and having her die...Yasha kept the blood flowing. Soon, the woman would turn, and Yasha didn’t want it to happen out in the middle of an alleyway.

  
  


With no other choices presenting themselves to Yasha, she did the only thing she could think of. She took the woman to her apartment.

  
  


The apartment was very nice. Yasha had never lived in an apartment before. At least, she was pretty sure she had never lived in an apartment before. The only part of her life she remembered was the time she had been with Obann and Molly and the rest of them. Obann had insisted that they all have some semblance of normality, living in the city, and apparently living in an apartment was one of those things.

  
  


There was a big bath, and a big bed, and all kinds of other things that Yasha didn’t really use. She tried turning the television on once, but the bright colors and loud noises had been too much. It had taken several tries (and an emergency visit from Molly) to learn how to use the stove, but now Yasha knew how to make pancakes (and nothing else).

  
  


It wasn’t until Yasha stepped into the elevator (thankfully it was late enough that no-one else was around) that she realized that Molly had followed her. He had found a towel from somewhere, and was cleaning up the drops of blood that had fallen from the woman’s wounds.

  
  


‘You know, if you’d been seen…’ Molly said. He didn’t need to finish the sentence. He was talking about Obann, rather than about everyone else. Most people _couldn’t_ see Yasha, unless she wanted them to. It generally took someone with a very strong force of will. Someone like the person lying unconscious in her arms.

  
  


‘He will be off trying to give an update to the Angel,’ Yasha said. Exactly what Obann’s plans were beyond “take over the city,” Yasha wasn’t sure. She assumed that eventually, they would have to carry out those plans.

  
  


‘And what about the Hand?’ Yasha didn’t think the Hand would bother them. It wasn’t his style. The Cadogeist, though, she had a very annoying habit of popping up out of nowhere.

  
  


The apartment was, just as Yasha had expected it to be, empty. She went straight to the bathroom, and put the woman in the bathtub, just so she could clean up and bandage the wounds. Obann had been ruthless; there was barely a part of her body that wasn’t covered in bite, or claw, or stab wounds. The fact that she was still alive was a near miracle.

  
  


Yasha put a hand to the woman’s shoulder, and tried to heal. She could feel the shadowy, spectral wings come out from behind her, but the healing didn’t take. It wasn’t surprising. The wounds that Obann made had always been funny like that. She stretched her shoulders, and the wings folded back into her.

  
  


Where they had come from, and why she had them, Yasha couldn’t remember. There was a whole part of her memory that was just...blank. For all that it mattered, her life had started the day Obann had rescued her, had pulled her out of a pit of darkness and given her purpose. Every now and then, she had a memory of a person or a place that she was supposed to know, and yet didn’t, but they were always fleeting.

  
  


‘How the fuck is she even still alive?’ Molly was incredulous, as he leaned over the tub to look. Yasha thought, too late, that she should hide her bleeding arm behind her back. ‘Are you _kidding_ me? You’ve been feeding her? You know how dangerous that is, Yasha.’

  
  


‘She isn’t…’ Yasha said. ‘She’s not turning. There is something about her. I don’t know.’ She couldn’t stop her voice from sounding utterly helpless. ‘I thought they were supposed to turn.’

  
  


‘You can’t keep her here,’ Molly said, and Yasha knew that he was right. The longer she kept the woman here, the more likely it was that she would actually die. She needed proper medical care. Care that could not be given in an apartment, no matter how fancy it was. ‘Kill her and be done with it.’

  
  


‘I…I can’t.’

  
  


Molly gave a beleaguered sigh. ‘Then drop her off at the hospital. Yash, if he finds out, he’ll kill you, and weirdly enough, I don’t want that to happen.’

  
  


‘I would like to see him try,’ Yasha said, evenly. She did not want to hurt Obann. He had given her everything. But, if it came down to it, if she had no choice… ‘You would have my back, wouldn’t you?’

  
  


Molly hesitated. ‘Of course,’ he said, finally. ‘If he tried anything, he’d be dead before he could even get his claws out.’ There was no trace of a lie in his voice, but then, Yasha had never been very good at picking truth from lie. She took things at face value, for the most part. There was also the matter that even the two of them together stood no chance against Obann, the Laughing Hand, and the Cadogeist. That was without even taking into account… _him_. The Angel of Irons. The one they were doing this for. ‘Gods, Yasha.’ He put a well-manicured hand to his head. ‘Do you even know who she is? Like, we know she’s with the fucking _Department of Vampire Killers_ , but _who is she_?’

  
  


‘I…we have been…’ Yasha didn’t quite know how to say it. How could she explain that the moment she had laid eyes on this woman, with her stake gun and her camera in the den of liars and thieves, that she had been drawn to her. That they had had a number of…meetings, passing like ships in the night.

  
  


‘Oh my Gods.’ Molly’s voice was filled with a sudden understanding. ‘Yasha, did you _fuck_ her?’

  
  


Yasha didn’t say anything, but she knew that her silence was answer enough. “Fuck” seemed like hardly the appropriate term. It had felt so much deeper than that, something so much more meaningful. Yasha had only taken blood when the woman asked her to.

  
  


‘You did! Do you even know her name?’

  
  


Yasha shook her head. She gestured to the woman’s jacket that she had taken off to examine the wounds. There was a wallet and a phone there, but Yasha hadn’t quite had the…well she hadn’t wanted to go through them. It felt like too much. Molly, however, had no such hesitation. He flipped open the wallet, and pulled out a driver’s license.

  
  


‘Beauregard Lionett,’ he announced. ‘Born 4th of Fessuran, 1994 P.D. Eye color blue, Height, five feet six inches. Lives on Kings Avenue in the Innerstead Sprawl.’ He flashed the card at Yasha. ‘She needs to renew her license. It expires next month.’

  
  


‘Beauregard,’ Yasha murmured to herself. She wasn’t sure what she had thought that the woman’s name would be, but she would not have picked Beauregard. She had thought that that was a man’s name.

  
  


Yasha’s musing was interrupted by the sound of a knock on the door. She shared a horrified look with Molly.

  
  


‘Well, _that’s_ not good,’ he said.


	11. How inconvenient and unexpected and harrowing for you

XI – How inconvenient and unexpected and harrowing for you

  
  


Yasha stared at the door, as though if she didn’t go and open it, whoever was on the other side would just go away. She was not that lucky.

  
  


‘What do I do?’ she hissed to Mollymauk. She was still covered in blood, and there was a barely-alive woman in her bathtub.

  
  


‘Take off your shirt,’ Molly told her. Yasha didn’t know why, but she took off her shirt. The skin underneath was marginally less bloody than the shirt. ‘Stand still.’

  
  


‘What—’ Yasha hadn’t noticed Molly picking up the adjustable shower head. He pointed it in her direction and sprayed.

  
  


‘Pants too,’ Molly said. Yasha stripped off her pants. Molly had certainly seen her in much less clothing than this before, and given Molly’s lack of concern for other peoples’ comfort, she had seen him in even less. That hardly seemed to matter, though, given the urgency of the situation. There was another knock at the door.

  
  


‘Just a moment!’ she called out. There weren’t many people in the world that visited her, but none of them were a particularly good omen. Obann, at least, would have just let himself in. That left another member of the group, or a complete stranger. Even a stranger would be bad, given that it would take a lot of hosing down to wash all the blood off. At least her underwear was black. A few years back, she wouldn’t even have been _wearing_ underwear.

  
  


‘Here.’ Molly grabbed a large navy blue towel from the rack. Yasha wrapped it around herself. Molly gave her a once-over, apparently checking for any stray bloodstains. ‘Shit, your hair.’ Yasha looked down and realized that the white tips of her hair were stained pink. Molly threw the other towel at her. Frowning, Yasha put the towel around her shoulders. Molly looked aghast. ‘No, what, haven’t you ever—-ugh. Here.’ He stepped towards Yasha, and forcibly angled her head downwards, the long braids of her hair swinging across her face. He did something with the towel then that Yasha didn’t quite put together, but the end result of which was that her hair was sitting atop her head, wrapped in a towel. It was…disconcerting.

  
  


One of those things that was so utterly human, and made Yasha feel like she did not belong, like having a library card, or driving a car, or having dinner at a restaurant. She was part of this world, but not of it. Obann had...well, Obann had helped her feel like she belonged, but not nearly as much as Molly had. Molly who like Yasha, remembered so little of his life, and yet was doing a much better job of fitting in, who knew things like how to twist a towel up on your head, and which pedal was the brakes.

  
  


Yasha went to the door, and looked through the peephole. On the other side was a short, dark-skinned Drow figure with flaming red hair. ‘It’s Jourrael,’ Yasha mouthed back to Molly, who rolled his eyes. If the Laughing Hand was Obann’s right hand (no pun intended), then Jourrael was his left.

  
  


Meaning that if Yasha didn’t let her in, then Obann would hear about it.

  
  


She opened the door. ‘What do you want?’ she asked. Jourrael looked at Yasha, with a towel wrapped around her body, and a towel wrapped around her hair. On the whole, Yasha tended to just walk around the apartment naked, but Jourrael didn’t know that. This was the first time the Cadogeist had ever actually been here.

  
  


Jourrael was looking around the place, curious. Her eyes locked onto Molly, standing by the fridge, and Yasha could tell that she was making assumptions. The same assumptions that people always seemed to make. ‘Obann wanted me to check on you,’ she said. ‘He thinks you’ve been acting strangely.’

  
  


‘Why would I be acting strangely?’ Yasha demanded, and she could almost feel Molly putting a palm to his face behind her. Of all the things that Yasha was good at (being angry, killing things….that was about it) lying wasn’t one of them. She wanted to think that her words had had some kind of intimidation factor, but Jourrael was not an easy person to scare.

  
  


The Drow frowned. ‘Is there someone in your bathtub?’

  
  


If Yasha’s heart had beat, she would have sure she would have heard it stop. She had somehow forgotten that another vampire would be able to smell someone else in the apartment, would be able to hear that slow beat of the heart. In Yasha’s defense, she hadn’t been a vampire for very long. At least not as long as any of the rest of them, save Molly. She’d sort of forgotten what vampires could and couldn’t do.

  
  


‘I—’

  
  


‘She wants a pet,’ Molly interrupted. There was a moment of agonizing silence where Jourrael stared Molly down, as though trying to discern whether or not he was lying. It wasn’t technically a lie. Well...she didn’t want a _pet_. Not in the way that most other vampires seemed to want them. She didn’t want someone at her beck and call, wearing a collar around her neck. Companion was perhaps a better term, and even then…this had definitely not gone the way that Yasha had planned.

  
  


Jourrael’s eyes narrowed. ‘Well, it’s about time,’ she said. ‘Show me what you’re looking at.’ Without waiting for a response, Jourrael headed straight for the bathroom. Yasha didn’t dare stop her. Jourrael had a hair-trigger temper, and daggers that she was not afraid to use, even on other vampires.

  
  


Beauregard was still alive, and Yasha wasn’t entirely sure why. She wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t _undead,_ and that was the confusing part. Yasha was vaguely aware that there was something of a period of limbo between biting someone, and having them turn. Molly had explained it to her once, but it had been very confusing.

  
  


It was something like...they could be kept “alive” so to speak, indefinitely, as long as there was a frequent enough feeding. Too much feeding, and they would turn.

  
  


But Yasha had fed her no small amount, and she wasn’t turning _or_ dying.

  
  


Jourrael kneeled by the tub. She put a hand to the woman’s forehead, and made a contemplative sound. Then, she took a thumb and forefinger, and peeled back one of the woman’s eyelids. The small sliver of iris that Yasha could see was bright blue. Not that that meant much.

  
  


Then, she pulled up the woman’s shirt, revealing the set of claw marks that Obann had left, as well as another wound that looked much, much older. It was green, and pus-filled, and looked as though it might have been spreading. Yasha had never seen anything like it before.

  
  


‘There’s your problem,’ Jourrael said. She sniffed the air. ‘Smell that. Decay. You went and picked yourself someone that was already undead.’

  
  


_Already undead? What did that mean?_

  
  


‘No wonder Obann though she was bland. It’s that zombie rot.’

  
  


Zombie rot? That didn’t make any sense at all. Yasha had seen zombies, and they looked nothing like this. They were brainless, mindless things. They didn’t sneak into vamp dens to take photos, or drink beer, or do clever things with their tongue…

  
  


‘Is there anyway to….do something?’ Yasha asked, before she could stop herself. She didn’t truly think that Jourrael could – or _would_ – help, but she had no other options.

  
  


‘Well, I’ve never come across anything like it before.’ That was saying something. Yasha had never really been quite sure how old she was. Old enough that she had things to forget. However old she was, though, Jourrael was much, much older. ‘It might be that enough of the virus could...maybe overtake the first one, but I doubt it. You’re better off finding a different pet, Orphanmaker.’ The name made Yasha jump. She didn’t like being called Orphanmaker. She didn’t know where the name had come from, but she knew that she didn’t like it.

  
  


Jourrael laughed. ‘If you’ve got cold feet, I can do it for you. Slit her throat before she can even groan her way out of it.’

  
  


‘No!’ Yasha’s response was far quicker than was wise. If Jourrael hadn’t been suspicious already, then she certainly was now.

Molly, thankfully, took pity. ‘We’re already covered in blood,’ he said. ‘No sense in getting you messed up, too. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it gets done.’ Yasha had to physically stop herself from frowning. Molly was taking ownership for her mistake. If something went wrong, now, it was him on the line as much as it was Yasha.

  
  


Yasha had no illusions as to why he was doing it. He was doing it for her, not for the woman in the bathtub. Even still, he did not move away from the bathroom door as Jourrael left the apartment. Yasha waited until she could hear the sound of the elevator doors closing before slamming her fist against the wall.

  
  


‘Fuck,’ she said. This was not how things were supposed to have gone. She was supposed to bring the woman – Beauregard – here to take care of her wounds, and then she supposed she would have dropped her off at the hospital.

  
  


Now that Jourrael knew, Obann would soon follow. If Yasha did nothing, if she left Beauregard in the bathtub, then Obann would see that she could not be turned, and kill her. Yasha’s punishment would be swift and assured. He would put the collar back on, at the very least. That mind control that he implemented at sparing moments would overtake her, night and day. She would be living her life through a lens, as someone else handled the controls.

  
  


The punishment, admittedly, she could probably do nothing about, but the other thing…Well, she could do something about that.

  
  


If they took her to the hospital, then maybe….maybe they would be able to convince Obann that they had killed her and gotten rid of the body. But then, he would of course want to know what they had done with it. Yasha felt herself spiraling. She didn’t know what to do. So many strange and confusing feelings had overtaken her.

  
  


‘Molly.’ Yasha looked at him, desperately. Since the day they had met, they had been by each other’s side, inseparable, and loyal to the last. ‘Molly, I need your help.’

  
  


Molly looked grim. ‘Yash, you know what I would say. If you don’t kill her, he’s going to hurt you, and...I don’t want that to happen.’ Yasha didn’t particularly want that to happen either, but she knew that on some level, she deserved it. The her that used to be...she didn’t remember it, but she knew that she had done bad things. Even the her that she did remember had done bad things. If she could save Beauregard, then maybe she could forgive herself just a little.

  
  


Yasha looked down into the bathtub. Beauregard’s face was smeared with blood, and her heart was still holding on, beating out a tiny, weak little pump about every second and a half. Even in unconsciousness, her fist was half-clenched. Yasha wondered if she liked flowers. Wondered what her favorite food was, wondered whether or not she had family. Their conversations...well, there hadn’t really been that much talking.

  
  


Yasha had no idea why she was so drawn to this woman, why the world had insisted that she cross paths with this woman who could very well just die in her bathtub. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that they were both kind of disasters. Yasha certainly didn’t know many well-adjusted people that went to the vamp dens, but then, she didn’t really know that many people at all.

  
  


Molly said something, but Yasha wasn’t listening. He waved a hand in front of her face. ‘Hey, Yasha. Are you with me?’

  
  


‘I...yes, I’m here.’

  
  


‘I said, “do you trust me?”’

  
  


‘Yes.’ That, at least, was one thing that Yasha didn’t have to think about. She trusted Molly beyond anyone else, any _thing_ else. She trusted Molly more than she trusted even her own mind.

  
  


‘Alright,’ he said, and Yasha wasn’t sure whether it was her imagination or not, but he looked like he was going to be sick. ‘I’ve got an idea, but you’re really, really not going to like it.’


	12. I'm taking her home with me

XII – I’m taking her home with me

‘I’ve got an idea, but you’re really, really not going to like it.’

  
  


Already, Yasha felt apprehensive, and for good reason.

  
  


Molly was a very good liar, but he tended to lie a lot; to Obann, to the Cadogeist, to the Laughing Hand, but never to Yasha. In the entire time that they had known each other, he had never once lied to her. If he said that she wasn’t going to like his idea, then she wasn’t going to like it.

  
  


But, what choice did she have?

  
  


‘I’m listening.’ She did not tear her eyes away from Beauregard.

  
  


‘You want to get her to the hospital, right?’

  
  


‘Right,’ Yasha agreed. The hospital, at least, would have the equipment to do some kind of transfusion, to give her the antivirals that counteracted the virus, and to deal with whatever the strange, necrotic wound was. Getting her to the hospital was going to be the difficult part. Yasha didn’t have a car, and while she was pretty good at not showing up in cameras, or in peoples’ peripheral vision, carrying a body around would probably change that.

  
  


‘And we both know that Jourrael is gonna go straight to Obann and tell him what happened.’

  
  


‘Right,’ Yasha said again. Whatever they did, the body _had_ to be gone by the time Obann got here. If it wasn’t then he would tear Beauregard apart himself.

  
  


‘So when Obann does get here, he’s gonna need to see a pretty clear sign that there was a…’ Molly paused, hesitating. ‘A bloodbath.’ Yasha stared down at her towel, which had started off a dark blue, but was now almost black with blood. Clearly Molly hadn’t gotten it all off.

  
  


‘There is already a bit of a bloodbath,’ Yasha said. Never mind that they literally had a bath that was soaked in blood.

  
  


‘You and I both know how much blood comes out of a person when you kill them, Yash,’ Molly said, quietly, and even then, it took Yasha another few moments to fully understand what he meant.

  
  


‘Oh….I don’t...I can’t…’ She couldn’t take _more_ blood from the woman. For as barely as she was clinging to life now, that would not last if they took more. She looked down to her own wrists, bloody holes where her teeth had pierced the skin. Molly, somehow, seemed to get what she was thinking.

  
  


‘It’d never work,’ he said. ‘They know what your blood smells like. If you want to make this believable, then she’s gotta be right on the edge of death.’

  
  


She already _was_ on the edge of death, Yasha wanted to say, but didn’t. There was a difference, she knew, between being almost dead, and being on that narrow, wafer-thin precipice, threatening to fall off at a moment’s notice. That was the kind of almost dead that Beauregard needed to be for Obann to believe that they’d gone and dumped her body somewhere.

  
  


Molly was right. Yasha didn’t like it a single bit. But, she bet she would like it even less if Obann caught wind of what they were doing, and murdered Beauregard anyway.

  
  


Yasha kneeled, and put her hand to Beauregard’s cheek. There was still the slightest amount of warmth there, and her whole body seemed to respond to Yasha’s touch. The eyes fluttered open for about half a second, but then shut once more. ‘Please forgive me,’ Yasha murmured. ‘I did not know what I was doing.’

  
  


Molly was staring at her. ‘Gods,’ he said. ‘You really fell for this woman, didn’t you?’

  
  


‘There is just...I find her very compelling.’ Yasha didn’t quite know how to explain it. There was just something about a person that could stare her in the eyes and not even think of being afraid that was so…alluring, so magnetic.

  
  


‘Do you…’ Molly hesitated. ‘Do you want me to do it?’ He gestured towards Beauregard’s neck. Yasha faltered.

  
  


‘No,’ she said, finally. ‘If it has to be done, then I should do it.’ She stroked the bloodied cheek beneath her fingertips. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered, before leaning in and piercing the skin of Beauregard’s neck.

  
  


Beauregard gave a harsh, rasping gasp. Yasha would have compared it to a death rattle, and it shook her enough that she pulled back almost instantly, but the damage was already done. Blood was flowing freely, and at a great speed. Yasha had torn enough throats out in her time to be able to get the artery the first time. Almost immediately, Yasha felt a wave of regret wash through her. How could this plan possibly work? Had Molly gotten her to do it, just so she would kill the woman?

  
  


Yasha brought her wrist to her mouth, and re-pierced her own skin. The moment two drops of dark red blood welled up against her skin, she put her wrist back down to the woman’s mouth. It wouldn’t turn her, apparently, but it would at the very least keep her alive.

  
  


‘I think that’s enough,’ Molly said, finally. He was talking about the blood that had spilled in the tub, rather than the blood that Yasha was feeding to the woman that was near death. Yasha had to admit, it very much did look like someone had been...well, murdered in here.

  
  


Yasha made to pick her up, but Molly cleared his throat. At first, Yasha didn’t realize when. Then, she followed his eye-line, and remembered that she was still wearing just a towel. Carrying a body through the streets was one thing, but doing it half-naked was probably bound to draw even more attention.

  
  


She could tell Molly was trying not to roll his eyes. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘I won’t let her die while you put pants on.’

  
  


Yasha put on pants. Then, she put on a shirt; both black, so that at least the blood wouldn’t show up on them after they left. Hands, arms, whole body shaking, she knelt down, and picked up the still breathing body of Beauregard from the tub. She gave a choking, bloody cough as Yasha lifted her, but Yasha could still hear that faint heartbeat hanging on, so she tried not to let herself worry.

  
  


‘Grab her jacket,’ Yasha told Molly. If they maybe covered up some of the blood-stained bandages… She grabbed some toilet paper, and wiped as much of the blood as she could off Beauregard’s face. There. With slightly less bloodied face, and the jacket covering up the bandages, Yasha was just carrying a sleeping person down the street. Not unheard of in these parts of Zadash at this time of morning.

  
  


‘You know,’ Molly was saying, as they went for the door. He was very carefully watching the _drip_ , _drip_ , _drip_ of blood that stained the apartment floor as Yasha (carefully, gently, slowly) carried the woman. ‘It might be easier if we just dump her in a random alleyway, and call in an anonymous tip.’

  
  


‘No,’ Yasha said, before she’d even thought about it. ‘That is too dangerous. She might die, if they don’t get there in time.’ A pause. ‘I don’t know if people can hear my voice over the phone. I tried ordering a pizza once, and they just started screaming.’

  
  


In spite of the situation, Molly gave an amused snort. He pushed open the door, and checked the hallway before giving Yasha a nod. Yasha wasn’t sure what she would have done if Obann had been out there.

  
  


The hospital was two blocks away. Not far, but ultimately, far enough that people would probably notice Yasha carrying a blood-covered woman through the streets. She would definitely need Molly’s help.

  
  


It was very, very early in the morning. Early enough that there wouldn’t be a lot of people around. If they were going to do it, they would have to do it now. Molly could Charm anyone that saw them, and Yasha’s aura would hopefully take care of any security footage.

  
  


It was slow going. Yasha stopped every few steps, just to check that Beauregard’s heart was still beating. There wasn’t much to be done about the trail of blood that they were leaving behind, but even that was starting to slow. That was either a good sign, or a bad sign, and Yasha didn’t know which. Either the blood was clotting, and the wounds were starting to seal, or there was simply not enough blood left to drip.

  
  


Finally, though, they were less than a hundred feet away. Yasha stared up at the bright, neon lights that read “St. Sarenrae.” She had walked past this place a dozen times, a hundred times, always wondering, but never quite bothering to look it up. She wasn’t very good with computers anyway; they sort of tended to go haywire when she got near them. ‘Do you know who St. Sarenrae is?’ she asked Molly, while they waited for a crowd of drunken teenagers milling around the fountain to disperse. He had always had a strangely wide knowledge of folklore and religion.

  
  


Molly’s brow furrowed. ‘That’s the Everlight, isn’t it?’ Yasha couldn’t shrug, but simply stared at him. The only god she knew about was the Stormlord, the god that she dreamed about sometimes. She was sure that he must have been important to her, in the Before Obann times, but she did not – could not – remember. ‘Goddess of healing, redemption and...something else. Might’ve been toenails.’ He was clearly trying to get Yasha to smile, but Yasha was only have listening.

  
  


_Goddess of redemption._ Redemption was something that she sorely needed in her life, and yet so far, there had been no possible avenue of finding it. Up until barely a week ago, the only things she knew had been the things that she had learned under Obann. Trying to escape him was like trying to escape a room with no door. She didn’t even know where to start. She had tried, of course...meeting strange women in vamp dens to try and forge some sort of connection, but that had not turned out very well. Yasha was certain that she was in a worse position now than she had been before she had met Beauregard. At least if they had never met, then Beauregard wouldn’t be half an inch from death.

  
  


‘I think we’re clear,’ Molly said. The teens, jeering and shouting at nothing in particular, had wandered off down the street. ‘Hey, you grabbed her wallet and phone, right?’

  
  


‘No,’ Yasha said, frowning. She had quite literally had her hands full as they left, and wouldn’t have been able to pick up the woman’s things even if she’d wanted to. ‘Is that a bad thing?’

  
  


‘They can probably track the phone,’ he admitted. ‘Though, being near you might make that difficult. We’ll have to deal with it when we go back.’

  
  


Yasha nodded. She hadn’t thought of that. Molly was very smart, when he wanted to be. It would be just their luck to evade Obann’s wrath and then have the Cobalt Soul kick down the door anyway.

  
  


‘You go,’ Molly said, gesturing his head towards the hospital. ‘I’ll keep watch.’

  
  


Yasha didn’t wait for him to say it twice. She ran across the road, ignoring the horns from the car that nearly hit her. The fluorescent lights of the hospital reception were calling her.

  
  


Yasha had heard stories – mostly from Molly – that the hospitals in Zadash were used to getting people dumped at their doorsteps. There were enough vampires and sorcerers and werewolves around that sometimes things went wrong, and the staff were trained to just...let it happen, for lack of a better word, rather than causing any more injury to potential patients.

  
  


Yasha set Beauregard down on the concrete as gently as she could. The other woman’s eyes were still closed, and it was only now, in the harshness of the hospital lights that Yasha realized just how bad she looked. In addition to the bites, her face was covered in bruises and scratches. Blood had soaked through the jacket that covered her.

  
  


Against her better judgment, Yasha bent down, and pressed a kiss to Beauregard’s forehead. She looked up at the flickering neon lights. From this angle, she could see the halo above the first “a” in Sarenrae. The sheathed wings at her shoulders burned.

  
  


‘Be safe, Beauregard,’ Yasha whispered, before she ran off into the early hours of the morning to find Molly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Please note the new warning added to this fic, and please don't panic).


	13. Doomed are the merciful

XIII – Doomed are the merciful

Yasha and Molly watched from the alleyway. If Yasha had had a heartbeat, it would have been fast.

  
  


It took a very short time for someone to rush to the door. A woman in pale blue scrubs ran out, and was calling back for someone inside the hospital to bring help. It was another two or three minutes after that that the doctors arrived, with a stretcher, and a vast array of medical equipment. None of them seemed to be bothering about exactly _how_ Beauregard had gotten there. Yasha supposed that it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, for victims of supernatural creatures to be dropped off on their doorstep.

  
  


They stayed there for at least five minutes, watching. Yasha could feel Molly getting antsy behind her, but she would not – could not – leave, until she had seen that the doctors were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

  
  


Finally, they loaded Beauregard onto the stretcher, and carried her into the hospital, and Molly’s patience ran out. ‘Yasha,’ he said, his hand at Yasha’s shoulder. ‘We need to go.’

  
  


Yasha’s eyes held their gaze on the hospital for a moment longer before she pulled away. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  
  


Though Yasha was faster, Molly took the lead. Distracted as she was, Yasha didn’t notice that they weren’t heading to her apartment until they were two blocks from Molly’s place.

  
  


Somehow, the journey back to the apartment seemed to take just as long as the journey there, even though they didn’t need to go nearly as slow. Yasha was so afraid that Obann was going to burst out of the nearest alleyway and confront them. It wasn’t the “dumping a body” thing that was a problem. Obann generally expected that they would all take care of their own little problems. It was the “dumping someone outside of a hospital” that he would have taken issue with.

  
  


If she was in any way a good liar, she would be able to explain it away as not wanting to get caught with a dead body, but even that was a weak excuse that Obann would see right through. Molly was a little better, but even he got caught up in trying to make his stories as outlandish as possible.

  
  


‘Why here?’ Yasha asked, and Molly shrugged.

  
  


‘Thought you might want to clean up without all the blood everywhere.’ There was a little more to it than that. Yasha knew Molly well enough to figure that out. He probably thought that going back to her apartment would bring back some bad memories, and he wasn’t wrong.

  
  


Molly’s place was as vastly different from Yasha’s as it was possible. Whereas she hadn’t even thought to decorate the walls, or buy vases, or really do anything beyond the stock standard furniture that the apartment had come with, Molly had very clearly tried to make this place his own.

  
  


It was interesting the way that their memories issues had manifested themselves so differently. While Yasha was still trying to figure out the world and her place in it, Molly spent most of his time making the things that he did have control over as memorable as possible. There was no part of the tiny apartment that wasn’t filled with color; one wall was taken up by an enormous mural of a dragon that had been pieced together with things that he had stolen from the dumpster of a craft store; broken feathers, and old paint, and half-empty containers of glitter.

  
  


Every single flower that Yasha had ever bought him (she had the strangest urge to buy flowers, and she wasn’t sure why) he had kept, and made pictures from the pressed and dried petals. There was one, a picture of a strange, fractured landscape, that Yasha had helped him with, pulled from the depths of a memory that she could not longer bring to mind.

  
  


Yasha showered. She spent a very long time under the hot water, scrubbing herself of the blood of someone she had almost killed. Whether what they had done was enough, she didn’t know, and maybe she wouldn’t know. After all, Obann would certainly be keeping a close watch on them for a while.

  
  


Molly, thankfully, had some of Yasha’s clothes here from the last time she had spent the night. It was such an easy, wonderful thing to lie on his couch watching old gangster movies and pretend that they weren’t under the ever-present thumb of an evil fiend. In another world, perhaps they had found each other another way, had been able to live lives of freedom without ever worrying that one of them would be screwed up and thrown away when Obann decided they were no longer useful. Yasha had seen it before; Obann taking peoples’ wills for his own, and killing them the moment that they broke free. That was not a future she wanted for herself, and certainly not for Molly.

  
  


What had happened tonight, though...that might put them over the line.

  
  


Yasha would have been happy to sleep on the couch again, but Molly (affectionately) called her an idiot, and pulled back the covers on his king-sized bed. This certainly wasn’t the bed that the apartment had come with, and Yasha did wonder just how many other people had passed through Molly’s bed. She had certainly never met any of them.

  
  


Perhaps she should have just done what he did...invite Beauregard into her bed, and then never see her again. It sounded absurd even thinking about it. Yasha didn’t know anything about her life before this, but she didn’t think that she was the sort of person that did that.

  
  


But, she had shared a bed with Molly before, and it was safe and comfortable, and all of those things. He could clearly tell that she was feeling...well, stressed from everything that had happened, and his tail wasted no time in wrapping around her waist as she settled herself under the covers. It was close to five a.m, now, and Yasha was sure she would sleep until well after noon.

  
  


She had thought that she would lie awake agonizing over things, but surprisingly, Yasha was almost immediately taken by sleep. As a vampire, she certainly didn’t _need_ sleep as much as a mortal, but it was nice to have some semblance of normality. Lying next to Molly, curled up against his memory foam pillows, Yasha’s bleary eyes blinked shut.

  
  


She dreamed.

  
  


_It was a hot day in Kamordah, a miserable day. Summers here were always disgusting, moreso because Beau’s father scolded her every time she wore something with a hemline above the knee. She had taken to going out in one outfit, and then immediately getting changed in an alleyway while Tori held up her jacket._ _The tank-top and denim shorts that she_ _had put on_ _would certainly have gotten her grounded._

  
  


_Even when it was cooler, she kind of liked that small act of rebellion. Of course, she was also engaged in much, much bigger acts of rebellion, like the fact that the reason she was meeting up with Tori was to go offload the thousand gold worth of suude that they had gotten from that guy in Zadash. Street value was something like ten thousand gold; they would finally be able to get the fuck out of Kamordah, and go to Zadash, or Nicodranas, or literally fucking anywhere else._

  
  


_It was a nice thought. With ten thousand, they could get a tiny apartment (maybe even with an ocean view), and find work somewhere in the criminal underworld. After all, the money wouldn’t last forever, and drugs were hard to come by._

  
  


‘ _What about wine?’ Tori asked, and it took Beau far longer than she was willing to admit before she figured out what Tori meant._

  
  


‘ _What, steal it?’_

  
  


‘ _Sure. It’s what, fifty gold a bottle? You wouldn’t even have to pay for it. That’s basically one hundred percent profit.’Sell forty bottles at half-price, and that’s a thousand gold.’_

  
  


_Beau couldn’t help but grin. ‘I think my dad’s gonna notice if forty bottles of wine go missing, T.’_

  
  


‘ _You do the books, don’t you? Fudge the numbers. He’s so busy being an asshole, he’s not paying attention to how much of the work you’re actually doing.’_

  
  


_Beau laughed. Tori wasn’t wrong. She also had a lot more confidence in Beau’s abilities than Beau’s father did, and even probably a little more than Beau herself. She grabbed Tori by the shoulders, and pulled her in for a very long kiss. ‘That’s why I love you.’_

  
  


‘ _Because I called your dad an asshole?’_

  
  


_Beau kissed her again. ‘Because you make me feel like I can do anything._ ’

  
  


Yasha woke up, sweating. Molly had left the curtains open, and a ray of early morning sunlight was piercing through the window.

  
  


It had been a very vivid dream. Not the first time that Yasha had seen someone else’s memories after drinking their blood, but certainly the most detailed of them. She had seen Beau – not Beauregard, Beau – as a teenager, full of spite and rebellion.

  
  


The dream had done nothing to assuage Yasha’s curiosity. If anything, it made her even _more_ curious about this woman that she had had perhaps three total interactions with, one of which had been almost killing her.

  
  


Before Zadash, she had lived in...what was it, Kamordah? Kamordah wasn’t that far from Zadash. Yasha had heard of it, but she had never been there. It was a pretty small town from what she could remember. Molly might now.

  
  


Molly was already up, pottering around the kitchen with toast and butter. He was surprisingly domestic when he wanted to be. ‘Do you want eggs?’ he asked, but before Yasha could answer, there was a knock at the door. They both froze. ‘Who is it?’ Molly called out.

  
  


‘Open the door, Mollymauk,’ came Obann’s voice.

  
  


_Fuck_.

  
  


Molly wasn’t moving, and Yasha took pity on him. ‘I will get it,’ she said.

  
  


The red devil was standing at the door as though he owned the place. He did, technically own the place, though Yasha wasn’t sure where he got the money for it. There were a lot of things that Obann did that he didn’t tell them about. ‘Yasha!’ Obann’s lips curled into a smile. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ He pushed his way into the apartment without asking for permission. Not that he needed to.

  
  


Molly picked up the frying pan. He had clearly predicted the reason for Obann’s being here. Not that it mattered; Obann was stronger than the both of them put together.

  
  


‘Do you want eggs?’ Molly asked, not tearing his gaze away.

  
  


Obann ignored him. ‘Can I tell you, Yasha, about the dream that I had last night?’ Obann stroked Yasha’s cheek, and Yasha felt a coldness spread through her body. ‘A dream about a very familiar woman, in a bar somewhere in this city. Can you think what she might have done at that bar?’

  
  


Yasha knew that Obann was not looking for an answer, the same way that she knew she had messed it all up. Obann had drunk Beauregard’s blood, of course he was dreaming her memories too. One (or two) memories in particular, about a stolen couple of hours in the back room of a vamp den. Strange that they hadn’t dreamed the same things, but then that was hardly the important thing right now.

  
  


‘I…’ Yasha tried to find the words. She thought of Molly, and of the lie he had told Jourrael. ‘I wanted a pet.’

  
  


The fingers on her cheek tightened slightly, and Yasha was sure he knew that she was lying. Or at least not telling the whole truth.

  
  


‘Oh Yasha.’ His hand shifted to her shoulder, and he began to squeeze.

  
  


‘Hey!’ Frying pan still grasped tightly in his hand, Molly was at Yasha’s side in an instant. Before Yasha could say or do anything, though, Obann had knocked Molly back with a powerful lash of his wing. Molly slammed into the wall, knocking down some pieces of the patchwork dragon. He didn’t get up.

  
  


Yasha felt the back of her neck burn, felt Obann’s mark burn. She tried to pull away, but found her mind frozen, unable to move against his will. ‘I think I’m going to have to keep a much, much closer eye on you from now on,’ he said. Yasha felt her consciousness slip away. It was a horrible, familiar feeling, the feeling of being in her body, and yet unable to control it. Like being behind the wheel of a car that was being driven by somebody else.

  
  


‘Now, you’re going to do exactly what I say from now on, aren’t you, Orphanmaker?’ Obann’s voice was silky smooth, and though Yasha’s mind was screaming _no, no, no,_ her mouth said otherwise:

  
  


‘ _Yes_.’

  
  


In the back of her mind, Yasha just about managed to find Molly in her unfocused gaze, leaning against the wall where Obann’s blow had sent him, blood dripping from a cut on his forehead. ‘Yasha.’ His voice sounded just as helpless as Yasha felt. She could not stop her dead eyes from turning towards him,  from staring at him blankly.

  
  


‘Yasha, no…’ His pleading voice fell on deaf ears. Yasha could feel the tears streaming down her face, the only reaction she could manage.

  
  


Obann laughed. ‘Very good, Orphanmaker. Now, come with me. We have work to do.’

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up, another POV shift. More paperwork from Dairon.


	14. Help me, if you can

XIV- Help me, if you can

Fjord was moving on autopilot.

  
  


Coffee in hand, and brain very, very far away, he made his way into the Cobalt Soul. In the lobby, they checked his I.D. card, and x-rayed his bag, and made sure that he hadn’t been taken over by a changeling sometime in the last twenty-four hours. It was a surprisingly frequent occurrence, to the point where there were posters up around the place with titles like “how to spot a changeling” and “how well do you know your partner”. There was supposed to be a daily routine to prevent mind-control and being replaced by an evil twin, but very few agents bothered to complete it. Caleb was one of those few, asking people unpredictable questions every time he ran into them in the hallways. Fjord had just about given up when Caleb had asked if he’d had any wet dreams lately. He was pretty sure Jester had put him up to it.

  
  


It was almost two o’clock, by the time he made it up to the Expositors offices. Since he wasn’t technically an Expositor, he didn’t have a desk there (and probably wouldn’t use it if he did), but there were a couple of hotdesks that were ostensibly for Consultant use. Fjord did most of his work in the field, and generally only really came to the offices to put his bag in his locker.

  
  


Last night, he and Caleb had spent several hours staking out the potential lair of a mad sea witch named Dashilla, who had somehow found a way to walk on land, and was luring people to bathtubs to try and kill them.

  
  


At least, that was the theory. They had spent eight fucking hours waiting outside a warehouse in a shitty car with no air-conditioning, and had not seen so much as a tentacle. Since Dashilla only seemed to operate at night, they had something of a brief reprieve before they had to go back out there.

  
  


That had been the plan, anyway. No sooner than Fjord had put his bag in his locker, he was accosted by Zeenoth. ‘You haven’t seen Beauregard, have you?’ Fjord started. He very rarely saw Zeenoth outside of the library. In fact, it was almost unheard of to see him in the Expositors office. ‘Dairon is looking for her.’

  
  


‘I’ve only just gotten here,’ Fjord told him. ‘She’s usually in by now, isn’t she?’ It was a tenuous sort of question. Beau had a tenancy to...well, to come in whenever she wanted. All the Expositors did, but none more than Beau. Given that she spent so much of her time out on literally _insane_ missions, Fjord couldn’t begrudge her a sleep-in.

  
  


‘Caduceus was due to run some tests on her,’ Zeenoth said. ‘No matter. It’s not the first time we’ve had to reschedule around Beauregard’s...tardiness.’ There was a hint of derision in that last word that Fjord wasn’t sure he entirely liked. For all that Beau was...well, a bit of a disaster, she did good work. ‘But as long as you’re in, I think Dairon wanted to see you anyway.’

  
  


Fjord suppressed a groan. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see Dairon.

  
  


Actually, no. That was definitely the case. He didn’t want to see Dairon. His relationship with Dairon worked best on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis. He didn’t tell her what he was up to, and then she didn’t have to tell the High Curator that he had accidentally almost freed an eldritch sea god from its shackles.  It had mostly been an accident. He’s only wanted to release it  _partway_ from its shackles.

  
  


Still, ever the dutiful consultant, Fjord went upstairs to Dairon’s office. They were on the phone, and looked thoroughly unimpressed about it. Fjord didn’t blame them. He’d heard the stories about the days Dairon had spent as an Expositor, and the number of murderous vampire dens and werewolf clans that she had taken out. Dealing with everyone else’s bullshit had to be something of a step down.

  
  


Dairon held up a finger as Fjord walked in. ‘It will be dealt with quickly, curator,’ she said, before ending the call. She motioned for Fjord to take a seat.

  
  


‘Update on the sea witch?’ she asked, though from the tone of voice, she didn’t care much about the sea witch at all. Still, he gave a brief rundown of what he and Caleb had been doing (conveniently not mentioning the fact that they had gotten so bored during stakeout that they had sort of possibly undertaken a blood oath).

  
  


‘Good.’ Dairon nodded. ‘You haven’t seen Beauregard by any chance, have you?’

  
  


‘Why does everyone seem to think that _I_ would know where Beau is?’

  
  


‘You spend time with her socially, do you not?’ He did, admittedly. But not as much as Jester did. Caleb...well, Beau was close with Caleb, but weirdly, they only ever went to the library together. Jester…Jester’s shift didn’t start for another ten hours.

  
  


‘I do,’ Fjord said. ‘Did you try _calling_ her?’

  
  


‘Straight to voicemail,’ Dairon told him, a grim sort of look crossing their face. Now if they’d _led_ with that, Fjord would have been much more concerned. Beau very, very rarely turned her phone off. In fact, more than once, he was fairly certain he had called her while she was in the middle of...well, she told him not to pay any attention to the screams at least, and he’d decided that he didn’t want to know anything more about it.

  
  


Of course, somehow he’d ended up finding out more than he’d wanted to know anyway. A sudden, horrible thought cross his mind, a thought involving the things that Beau liked to do outside of work. The things that no-one else knew about.

  
  


‘Do you want me to go to her apartment?’ With any luck, she was there, too hungover to come into work. It was a long shot. For all that Beau drank to excess, he was pretty sure she’d never been too drunk to come to work.

  
  


‘If you would.’ Dairon nodded. ‘If there is a problem, I would rather deal with it sooner than later. Take someone with you.’

  
  


Fjord waited a couple of moments before realizing that that was it. Dairon wasn’t much one for formal dismissals. They returned to their paperwork, before looking up, confused as to why he was still there.  Apparently they were done. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘On my way.’

  
  


At two in the afternoon, it was surprisingly empty. Fjord wandered around for twenty minutes before he found Veth in a supply closet, stealing crossbow bolts. 

  
  


‘Aaah!’ she cried out, when he opened the door. ‘What are you doing? I wasn’t stealing anything!’

  
  


‘You know, I might have to report this one to Dairon,’ he said, pretending very hard to think about it. ‘They deserve to know that someone has been pilfering supplies that could one day be the difference between life and death.’

  
  


‘Fuck you, Fjord!’ Veth snapped. ‘I saw you take five boxes of staples once! Not even a stapler. Just staples!’

  
  


Fjord flustered. ‘I was—No, you know what, I am not going to defend my staple use. Do you want to help me break in somewhere?’

  
  


Veth eyed him suspiciously. ‘You’re a goody-two-shoes. Where could you possibly want to break into?’

  
  


‘Beau’s apartment.’ He didn’t have a spare key. He didn’t even know who _did_ have a spare key.

  
  


Veth calmed down considerably. ‘Oh. You should have led with that. Of course I want to break into Beau’s place.’

  
  


Hmm. He didn’t think it would be that easy.

  
  


Veth led the way. ‘Now, Beau’s apartment is on the seventh floor. We could take the fire escape, but it’s a little rickety, and I don’t know if you’d be strong enough to climb the ladder. The good news is, the security guard is  _terrible_ , so it shouldn’t be too hard to get in.’

  
  


Fjord stared at her. ‘Do you just…break into our apartments just for—’ A sudden thought hit him. ‘Hey! You’re the fucker that’s been rearranging my shoes and leaving creepy messages on the bathroom mirror.’

  
  


Veth gave a dismissive wave. ‘If you didn’t want me to break in, then you would have installed better locks.’

  
  


Fjord resisted the urge to trip her and pretend it was an accident. After all, he needed her help. He would have to suffer in silence, but maybe later he could trick her into thinking she had killed him, or something.

  
  


In any case, she was right. The security on Beau’s building was  _terrible_ . The single security guard ignored them as they walked right through the front door, and when they got to Beau’s door, Fjord was able to open it with a single push, no lock-picking required.

  
  


‘And you’re so _weak_ ,’ Veth said, in wonderment.

  
  


Fjord ignored her, and stepped into the apartment.

  
  


It was...small. Actually, even small was an understatement. With him and Veth standing there, side by side, it was cramped. As such, it didn’t take either of them very long to see that the apartment was empty. Beau wasn’t there, and the apartment seemed settled, like no-one had been there in a while. Weirdly, though, that was a secondary concern to the next thing that Fjord noticed.

  
  


Above the small table that was apparently a desk, was...well, it was a wall of crazy. Fjord had seen walls of crazy before, and this was definitely a wall of crazy. There were images, and labels, and lots and lots of notes written directly on the wall in dry-erase marker, plus no small number of printouts in a very tiny font.

  
  


Veth grabbed the papers, and flipped through them. ‘She’s been researching  _Betrayer Gods_ . What kind of fucking case has she been working?’

  
  


‘Angels,’ Fjord commented. As far as he knew, that was the last thing that Beau had been looking into. The purple tiefling whose picture was tacked up on the wall, at least, was from the Angel case, at least. The fact that next to him was what looked like a Jester-sketch of a very attractive woman, that Beau had labeled “the Angel,” was also a pretty damning clue.

  
  


‘Do you think Dairon knows about this?’

  
  


Fjord did  _not_ think that Dairon knew about this. If Beau had wanted Dairon to know about it, then she wouldn’t have put it all together on a wall of crazy in her apartment. The question was, _why_ didn’t she want Dairon to know, and what had she discovered that had, apparently, caused her to not answer her phone, and not come in to work.

  
  


Whatever it was, he didn’t think it was going to be good news.

  
  


Fjord didn’t know what he had been expecting from coming here. Deep down, he knew he’d been hoping to find Beau passed out in her bed, maybe with someone else in it as well. He would get grossed out, and tell her to put some pants on and get into work, because Dairon was pissed, but Beau would grumble, and eventually comply.

  
  


This was not that. This was something else. Something bad.  Fjord took out his phone, and took a dozen or so photos of the wall in situ. The sheaf of notes, he tucked into his bag. Beau’s journal was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean much. She usually kept it on her. Just another reason that this was very, very bad.

  
  


Veth seemed to be thinking along the same lines. ‘Do you think her family knows where she is?’

  
  


‘No,’ Fjord said, without even thinking about it. Beau had told him about her family once, when they’d both been very drunk. He was pretty sure she’d regretted it afterwards, and Fjord had been sworn to secrecy. ‘They, ah…don’t get on.’

  
  


That was putting it lightly. The way Beau told it, she had been kicked out of home at sixteen, and had spent a little bit of time in juvie for stealing her dad’s wine. Of all the secrets that Beau kept (that different people seemed to know different parts of) that was the one small thing that Fjord knew. Beau was a big fan of keeping things in different baskets.  Keeping things in different baskets, though, meant that people had to put all the pieces together before they could help you.

  
  


‘Hmm,’ Veth said. ‘All I know is that she’s got a brother.’

  
  


Fjord couldn’t stop his eyebrows from raising in surprise.  Well that just proved his point. In all the conversations that they’d had, Beau had never mentioned a brother.

  
  


There was nothing else of interest in the apartment, save for some milk that looked like it was possibly several months past its used-by date. Fjord resisted the urge to pour it down the sink. If they had to call the police in, then he didn’t want to have interfered more than he already had. Veth apparently had no such compunctions, and drunk the entire bottle of spoiled milk before Fjord could stop her. He also didn’t really want to stop her. The consequences would be hilarious.

  
  


With nothing else to find, they headed back to the Cobalt Soul. Fjord secured the door as best he could, but a strong breeze probably could have opened it. In any case, he didn’t know if there was much in there to steal. For someone that came from a rich family, Beau’s lifestyle could have generously been called “frugal.” Though, whether it was frugal if it was involuntary remained to be seen.

  
  


Veth somehow managed to find an (admittedly, very flimsy) excuse not to have to come to Dairon’s office. ‘Sorry, my, ah...I need to water my plants!’

  
  


Dairon was not entirely surprised by what they had found. ‘If there is one thing that Beauregard is good at, it’s taking a thread and running with it,’ she commented, looking at the photos that Fjord had taken. ‘This is...a very, very concerning thread.’ Read: if this is about Betrayer Gods, then we are all in over our heads. This was not street-level, take out a few bloodsuckers causing problems. This was world-shattering stuff.

  
  


On the whole, it was a very problematic series of events. In short, Beau was missing, having been looking into a vampire den with possible connections to Betrayer Gods. There was no way that  _didn’t_ end badly.

  
  


‘I had our friends in I.T. attempt to trace her phone,’ Dairon told them. They pulled up a map on their computer screen. ‘It’s either turned off or destroyed at the moment, but this is the last area that she was in before it blipped out. Sometime around midnight last night.’ Fjord stared at the map.

  
  


He knew  _exactly_ what area that was, and the potential reasons for Beau to be there. From the shrewd look that Dairon gave him, he was starting to suspect that she did, too.

  
  


‘Check it out,’ she said. ‘Be…discreet. The last thing we need is our esteemed High Curator getting an idea of what our Expositors do in their spare time.’

  
  


Fjord nodded. There was a strange look on Dairon’s face. She went to pick up her phone again, but turned back to Fjord. ‘When you’ve done that, check the hospitals.’ It hit Fjord, all of a sudden, what that look was.

  
  


Fear.

  
  


It did very little to strengthen his resolve. There was a strange pit in the bottom of his stomach, as though he already knew that he was not going to find anything that he liked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Episode 105 spoilers**
> 
> of all the things from this fic to become canon, I did not think that Yasha loving pancakes would be one of them.


	15. This is not the way I'm wired

XV-This is not the way I’m wired

  
  


It took Fjord until he’d reached the vamp bar district before he realized that not too many of them would be open at five o’clock in the evening. Nor, he thought, would they be particularly forthcoming when it came to having a conversation with a person who worked for an organization that killed vampires.

  
  


He would have to be a little more delicate about this.

  
  


He put his lanyard in his pocket, and ruffled up his shirt. Then, he passed a hand over his face, and turned his visage to that of a young to middle-aged human man, darker skin, with a paunch in his stomach, and three days worth of five o’clock shadow. He looked just enough like Beau that they could have been related.

  
  


There were about a dozen vamp bars on this block, and Fjord went to all of them. For most, he spent about ten minutes knocking, and spun a tragic tale about looking for his wayward sister who had been kicked out of home. It was less of a lie than he made it out to be. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was greasing the wheels with significant tips.

  
  


The answers that he got were worrying. Not because they hadn’t seen Beau, but because they had. ‘Oh, sure, she’s in here all the time. Not for a few days, though.’ Fjord had known that Beau frequented these places, but there was a difference between frequenting them, and coming there every night of the week. It wasn’t until the fifth bar, though, that Fjord got the answer he was looking for.

  
  


‘Yeah.’ The bartender was cleaning the tables, and replacing all the coasters. ‘She was in here last night. Not for very long, though.’

  
  


‘On her own?’

  
  


The bartender considered it for a moment. ‘No. Was with a vamp, but they seemed to know each other.’ He sounded mildly surprised at this. Fjord got the idea that people didn’t generally come to these places to fuck people that they knew. ‘Don’t know what it is about the vamp, but it kinda gave me a headache to look at her.’

  
  


Fjord raised an eyebrow. He returned to the photo gallery in his phone, and found the picture that had been labeled “the Angel” in Beau’s apartment. ‘Was this the vampire?’

  
  


‘Yeah, that was her. They spent about ten minutes in the bar, and about half an hour in the back room. It’s weird, usually she takes a lot longer.’ Fjord grimaced. He absolutely didn’t want, or need to know that. ‘What time did she leave?’

  
  


‘I’d have to check the tapes,’ the bartender told him. ‘Probably about midnight. I don’t think she was still here when my shift ended at twelve-thirty.’

  
  


‘Thanks,’ Fjord said, and meant it. He rifled through his wallet and handed over a fifty gold note. ‘For your trouble.’ The bartender gave an appreciative nod, and pocketed it. Fjord sighed. Dairon was not going to be pleased about signing off on that expense. Not the weirdest expense he’d had her sign off on. There was a thing, with some stuff, and long story short, he’d had to spend about five-hundred gold on fresh clams to maintain his cover. Thankfully (or perhaps not), he’d gotten to keep the clams, and the next three months worth of dinners at the Cobalt Soul had been clam-based. By the end of it, the entire fifth floor had been ready to choke him. Beau had all but exhausted her supply of shellfish jokes.

  
  


Fjord’s phone buzzed. He looked down and saw a message from Caleb. “ _Dairon has asked me to check hospitals with you. I will meet you at St. Sarenrae._ ” Fjord had to think for a second. St. Sarenrae wasn’t far – probably within walking distance, and definitely the most likely hospital that Beau would have gone to if something had happened near the vamp bar. Even still, he walked slowly, keeping an eye for anything out of the ordinary as he walked. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find – maybe a body thrown in a dumpster?. That was his mind jumping to the worst case scenario.

  
  


The best case scenario, would be that Beau had accidentally left her phone at a bar, and gone home with someone. She’d be in some woman’s penthouse apartment, drinking champagne, and deciding that she didn’t want to go to work today.

  
  


But no. That wasn’t Beau. Not that she would turn down an evening in a penthouse with an attractive cougar, but she would definitely come to work afterwards, and brag about her accomplishments.

  
  


Caleb was already waiting outside St. Sarenrae. He was wearing his nice purple coat, rather than the smelly, threadbare brown one. He didn’t look like he had been there long. ‘Any luck so far?’ he asked. Fjord hesitated.

  
  


‘I think I have a bit of an idea as to what she was doing last night.’ That was an understatement. ‘It’s...well, it’s better that I don’t tell you.’ He didn’t want to be infringing on Beau’s privacy too much.

  
  


Caleb looked mildly perturbed by this, but did not argue. ‘Shall we, then?’ He nodded towards the hospital entrance.

  
  


It was sterile inside. Not in terms of cleanliness (though he was sure it was far cleaner than any doctor that he had ever been to), but in terms of general aesthetic. The walls and the floor were both white, and everything was sort of spaced out.

  
  


Fjord flashed his badge quickly enough that the receptionist hopefully couldn’t see that it said “Consultant,” rather than “Expositor.” Not that it mattered too much. In spite of their low budget, the Soul did generally have pretty good standing with most hospitals, and St. Sarenrae was no different.

  
  


‘Good morning.’ He gave the receptionist a genial smile. ‘We’re looking for a missing person. We’re checking all the hospitals in the area to see if any unidentified women have been brought in as a patient.’ He pulled the picture from his pocket; it was Beau’s official file picture, and barely resembled the person he knew in personality and substance. This was before she’d gotten half the piercings, and they weren’t allowed to smile. It was also the only time Fjord had ever seen her wear something that might have been considered appropriate workplace attire. She almost looked like a responsible adult.

  
  


The receptionist leaned forward to look at the photo. ‘The last Jane Doe that came in was early this morning, but I didn’t get a look at her face. You’d better hope it wasn’t her, because she looked pretty fucked up. Let me send that up to the nurses in the Emergency Room, they’ll have a better idea.’

  
  


‘How do you know?’ Caleb asked. Both Fjord and the receptionist turn to look at him.

  
  


‘What?’

  
  


‘How do you know she looked pretty fucked up, if you did not see her?’

  
  


‘Oh, I saw her.’ The receptionist grimaced. ‘Someone dumped her right out the front there. Her face was too badly bruised for me to say one way or the other.’ Fjord clenched his fist. This woman couldn’t have known…Couldn’t have understood how much of an impact her words were having.

  
  


‘What was she wearing?’ Caleb asked. The woman bit her lip, and looked up at the ceiling.

  
  


‘Bandages, mostly. Someone had done a pretty shit job of trying to fix her up.’ There was a pause. ‘Think she might have had a blue jacket?’

  
  


Fjord felt his stomach drop. ‘Can you…Can you please have someone bring us to her? Please.’ He tried not to make that last “please” sound too desperate, but it was difficult. He didn’t know much in life, but he had a very, very sickening feeling that something bad had happened.

  
  


He stepped backwards, while the receptionist got onto the phone. The charismatic half of him felt a little bad that he hadn’t even bothered to ask her name, had been so focused on the answers she was giving that he hadn’t bothered looking at her name tag. ‘It might not be her,’ he said, softly, to Caleb.

  
  


‘ _Ja_.’ Caleb’s voice was just as soft, just as slow, just as full of doubt.

  
  


A tall firbolg woman in blue scrubs and a white coat came to collect them. Before Fjord could even ask, she had introduced herself as “Doctor Guiatao.”

  
  


‘I do not know if this is a friend of yours,’ she said, as she led them upstairs. ‘But if she is, I must warn you that her condition is not good.’

  
  


There was still a small modicum of hope in Fjord’s mind that was utterly dashed the moment that they walked into the room. “Not good” was an understatement. The figure on the bed was covered in bandages, on the torso, on the neck and face, on the arms and legs. There was a breathing tube down the throat, and a blood bag that seemed to be in the middle of a transfusion. Though the eyes were closed, and the figure was deathly still, Fjord knew beyond shadow of a doubt that this was Beau.

  
  


‘ _Verdammt!_ ’ Caleb spat. Fjord couldn’t tell if it was shock, horror, or both. It didn’t particularly need a translation.

  
  


Fjord’s hand went to his pocket. He had to call Dairon. ‘Do you know this woman?’ Doctor Guiatao asked. ‘If you know who she is, and who might have her medical records, they would be of a great help.’

  
  


‘Jester,’ Fjord and Caleb said, at the same time. Fjord swallowed. His grip was tight around the phone in his hand. He and Beau were close, but he was pretty sure that Jester and Beau were closer. Or at least they had been.

  
  


‘I will call,’ Caleb said. He looked over at the bed. At Beau. ‘You…You see to her.’

  
  


Fjord nodded. He moved to Beau’s bedside. Close up, he could see even more wounds that weren’t bandaged. Though her left eye was shut, he doubted Beau would have been able to see anything through the swelling, even if she were conscious. The minor cuts and scrapes definitely seemed to indicate a struggle, which was not surprising in the least. Whatever had happened, Beau would have put up a fight. ‘May I…’ he said to Doctor Guiatao. ‘May I hold her hand? Tell her that everything will be alright?’

  
  


She smiled warmly. ‘Of course.’

  
  


It was difficult, given how covered in bandages Beau was. _What the fuck –_ who _the fuck_ – _had done this to her?_

  
  


Beau had definitely been weirdly secretive this past couple of weeks. There was something that she had been looking into, something that she hadn’t deigned to fill the rest of them in on. At least not on the details. Fjord knew that she had been studying angels, but _angels_ …that was a far cry from anything that any of them were used to dealing with. Demons and devils were one thing. Had the angel done this to her?

  
  


Weirdly, Fjord didn’t think so. This seemed like something more. He took Beau’s hand in his. It was cold, and clammy, like someone had sucked the life out of her. The doctor hadn’t said yet, but Fjord had the vaguest suspicion that that was exactly what had happened. ‘Hang in there, first mate,’ he said. It was an old in joke; whenever the work got a little much, they’d talked about buying an old fishing vessel, and setting sail on the open ocean. Not that Beau knew the first thing about sailing. “The captain’s the one that does all that,” she’d say, in a huff. “First mate is just there for moral support.”

  
  


She was strangely good at moral support, in her own unique way. She didn’t use words, but was very good at gestures. Once, after an argument, they hadn’t spoken for several weeks, until Fjord came into work one morning and found a very expensive bottle of Port Damali whiskey in his locker.

  
  


If Beau died…well, it would fucking suck.

  
  


Outside, the sky slowly turned to darkness, and Fjord didn’t dare move his hand.


	16. Help me understand

XVI - Help me understand

Fjord had been sitting by Beau’s side for almost an hour before Jester arrived. It didn’t take a highly trained Expositor to see that she was distressed, and Fjord wondered, vaguely, what Caleb had told her. Jester didn’t bother with niceties, barging through the door, and stopping, aghast, when she saw Beau lying there.

  
  


‘Why haven’t you healed her!’ Jester demanded. She ran up immediately, ignoring the protestations of Doctor Guiatao, and put her hands to Beau’s bandaged shoulder. Fjord watched, almost helplessly, as the magical energy seemed to course through Beau.

  
  


Nothing happened.

  
  


It the corner of the room, Caleb cleared his throat lightly. He looked like he was trying very hard to hold things together.

  
  


‘Jester,’ Fjord said, gently. ‘You know some wounds can’t be healed like that.’ They all knew. It was basically Cobalt Soul 101 – don’t get bitten by a vampire, or a werewolf, or a zombie, because healing magic doesn’t work the same way. Beau was apparently unlucky enough (or stubbornly nosy enough) for it to have happened twice.

  
  


‘We’ve already healed her stab wounds,’ Doctor Guiatao said, and the fact that Beau even _had_ stab wounds was news to Fjord. Because he wasn’t Beau’s next of kin (and because this had very quickly turned from a professional matter to a personal one), the doctors weren’t supposed to tell them anything. ‘All that’s left is the vampire bites, and the necrosis.’

  
  


Jester looked crestfallen. She had all but forgotten about the large sheath of files under her arm.

  
  


‘You’re her primary physician?’ Doctor Guiatao asked, and Jester pulled her hand away, straightening herself professionally.

  
  


‘Yes, I am Doctor Jester Lavorre. Beau’s...doctor.’ She handed over the files. ‘This is everything that’s happened in...the last six months. I’ve asked Doctor Shakaste to try and find everything older than that.’

  
  


The doctor’s eyes widened, and Fjord didn’t blame her. They always sort of joked that Beau was something of a walking disaster. She’d ended up on one of the gurneys in the medical office more times in a week than most other Expositors did in their entire careers. So far, she’d managed to walk them all off, but this one wasn’t looking like it would be as easy to recover from.

  
  


‘Can we talk in the hallway?’ Doctor Guiatao asked, and Jester sniffled. She gave a helpless sort of look to Fjord, before following the firbolg out. When they returned, Jester was crying harder than ever, and before Fjord could get up to comfort her, Caleb had put an arm around her shoulder.

  
  


Caleb had been very, very quiet, which Fjord had come to learn was not a good thing. There was a fury in his eyes that generally preceded things being burned. If Beau’s assailant (assailant _s_?) were to show up this very moment, they wouldn’t survive ten seconds, and there would no doubt be a lot of paperwork for all the little piles of ashes that were left behind.

  
  


‘Veth is coming with the necrosis suppressant,’ Jester said, as though she hadn’t left the room. ‘It’s an experimental treatment.’ Her voice sounded very, very far away, and she could not tear her gaze away from Beau lying there, unmoving.

  
  


‘Do you have knowledge of who her next of kin is?’ Fjord raised an eyebrow. ‘Someone that has the authority to make decisions on her behalf?’ He hadn’t even considered that thought, and wouldn’t have known who it was if Doctor Guiatao had asked.

  
  


Through her tears, Jester nodded. ‘I can call her.’

  
  


Fjord didn’t know who “her” was. It was something that they were all supposed to have, a person outside of the Cobalt Soul as something of an emergency contact. Fjord’s was his old captain, Vandran. He hadn’t actually even _seen_ Vandran in five years, but it was the only person he knew well enough to put them on his paperwork. The phone number he had was a very old one, and Fjord hadn’t bothered trying to call it in some time.

  
  


‘Who’s Beau’s next of kin?’ he asked, after Doctor Guiatao left. Jester set herself down on Beau’s other side, and took her hand. Caleb hovered, watching, but evidently not wanting to crowd things.

  
  


‘Keg,’ Jester sniffled. Fjord raised an eyebrow. Keg was a dwarven bartender that Beau had dated for six months approximately two years ago. He knew that they had kept in touch, and that Beau sometimes went to Keg for intel (among other things), but her being next of kin...that was something. He couldn’t exactly talk. That was something that they had in common, not really having much of a life outside of work.

  
  


‘Did one of you speak to Dairon?’ Fjord asked. He assumed that Caleb would have done it when he’d called Jester, but Fjord had forgotten to ask.

  
  


‘ _Ja_ ,’ Caleb confirmed. ‘They will...they will be here shortly.’ There was a very long pause. ‘Jester,’ he said. ‘What did the doctor say about...about what happened?’

  
  


Jester took a deep breath. ‘She said...she said that there had been two stab wounds in the abdomen, and like twelve sets of bite marks...just…everywhere on her body. From at least two different vampires, maybe more. She also said that it looked like one of them had been feeding her, maybe trying to turn her.’

  
  


Fjord sucked in a harsh breath. That wasn’t good. As best he knew, Beau couldn’t be turned, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t die of blood loss. The fact that someone had been feeding her, though...It was almost as though a vampire had unintentionally saved her life by trying to turn her, by giving her at least enough thread to be able to hang on a little while longer.

  
  


‘Fjord, did you discover what it was that Beauregard has been doing?’ Caleb asked.

  
  


Fjord hesitated. He didn’t want to throw Beau under the bus, but at the same time, he knew that every person in this very small hospital room could keep a secret. Veth, at least, wasn’t there yet. ‘I think she’s been meeting up with that angel,’ he said.

  
  


‘Meeting up?’ Jester asked, frowning. ‘What for?’

  
  


Fjord grimaced, and let his silence be the answer. Jester...He couldn’t quite tell what the look on Jester’s face. Sadness, obviously, but...guilt? Before he could ask, though, a tiny throat clearing indicated that Dairon had arrived. They looked far more distressed than Fjord had ever seen them, and was almost immediately demanding an update on Beau’s condition.

  
  


Fjord, seeing the look on Jester’s face, told Dairon, their fist remaining clenched for the duration of it. ‘Fuck,’ she said, finally. Then, she looked around, and seemed to see them all clearly for the first time. ‘I...brought food.’ Fjord hadn’t noticed the large plastic bag in their other hand. He hadn’t realized just how hungry he was, until they mentioned it.

  
  


Veth arrived not long after that, with several vials of necrosis suppressant in a cooler, clearly very upset at having missed dinner.

  
  


‘It was horrible,’ Fjord said, even as he downed his third helping of fried rice. ‘All vegetables, and hardly any meat. You wouldn’t have liked it at all.’ Veth narrowed her eyes at him.

  
  


‘You’re on thin ice, Tusktooth,’ she snapped. The cooler rattled slightly, and Veth’s eyes widened. ‘Oh shit. Where’s the doctor?’

  
  


‘Come,’ Caleb stood. ‘I will take you to her.’ Of course Caleb had been paying attention when the doctor had wandered off.

  
  


Fjord shifted his gaze to Jester, who had not left Beau’s side since Dairon arrived. She seemed very distracted, and did not stir at all when Fjord looked towards Dairon, and nodded out into the hallway. There, he told them exactly what he had discovered at the vamp bar.

  
  


Dairon grimaced. ‘I was worried that that was the case,’ she said. ‘Beauregard does have a tendency to…’ They seemed to consider their words for a moment.

  
  


‘Jump the gun?’ Fjord suggested (not that he could talk).

  
  


‘Get in over her head,’ Dairon said. Fjord thought that that was a little unfair. Beau was much more careful than she used to be. She did have that habit that so many of the Expositors had, of following things to their conclusion, no matter the outcome.

  
  


Fjord sighed through his teeth. ‘She must have discovered something that they didn’t want her to know. But then...why drop her off at the hospital? Why not just kill her?’

  
  


‘If, as you said, there were signs that she had been fed, then perhaps...perhaps it is more than just foolhardiness on Beauregard’s part.’

  
  


‘What, do you think the angel didn’t _want_ to kill her?’

  
  


‘Possible.’ Dairon thought for a moment. ‘Of course, there are other options. Go check the security footage of the outside of the hospital. See who dropped her off.’ A pause. ‘If you get a headache and a nosebleed, then you are on the right track.’

  
  


_Wonderful_. As for what Dairon meant by “there are other options,” Fjord wasn’t sure.

  
  


‘I will…’ Dairon hesitated. ‘I need to return to the Soul, to advise the High Curator of what has happened. Please keep me updated.’

  
  


‘Of course.’

  
  


Fjord wasn’t sure how he had ended up as Dairon’s “go-to responsible person.” He wasn’t exactly the poster child for responsible. He would have thought that they would be far more inclined to trust Caleb with this particular investigation. Caleb, for one, hadn’t made a deal with a sea serpent to get his magic. Not that anyone really knew the specifics of Fjord’s deal with Uk’otoa. The point was, he couldn’t exactly judge Beau for “getting in over her head,” as Dairon had put it.

  
  


He was well used to that. It sort of went with the territory. You weren’t a Cobalt Soul employee if you didn’t get in over your head every once in a while. That was why it paid to have friends that would help lift you up without any expectations.

  
  


As per Dairon’s prediction, the moment the hospital security guard showed him the footage of Beau being dropped off, he got a nosebleed. ‘Fuck.’ The guard handed him a tissue.

  
  


‘Yup,’ he said. ‘That’s what happens any time one of our people tries to watch it, too.’

  
  


‘You didn’t think to warn me?’ The guard shrugged.

  
  


‘You wanted to see it,’ he said. Fjord blinked, trying to clear his head. There had been a strange, fuzzy sort of blur on the screen. Apparently, the angel _had_ been the one to drop Beau off. That was...well, it was a little weird.

  
  


Fjord returned to Beau’s hospital room, where there had been no change. Veth had devoured what was left of the food that Dairon had brought, and was now regaling the others with what they had found at Beau’s apartment earlier that day.

  
  


So much had happened since that point, that Fjord had almost forgotten about the fact that...well, there were potentially Betrayer Gods involved. For that to be the least worrisome part of this was pretty fucked up.

  
  


Caleb and Jester were taking it all in silently. Jester had Beau’s hand in hers, and was rubbing it, more out of stress than a need to provide comfort, Fjord thought.

  
  


Caleb hesitated. ‘I do not wish...I do not wish for this to be the case, but there is the possibility that they have turned her.’ Fjord realized, all of a sudden, what Dairon had meant by “other options.”

  
  


‘She can’t—’ Jester started, and Caleb held up a hand.

  
  


‘ _Nein_ , not turned her like that...I mean...turned her against us. She could be a...a Julousi horse. Waiting to kill us all when she wakes.’

  
  


‘We only saw her yesterday,’ Fjord argued. ‘They couldn’t have broken her in that short a time.’

  
  


‘Mind control is a powerful thing.’ Caleb had a thousand-yard-stare, was looking past even Veth, through the window of the room.

  
  


‘No!’ Jester had been quietly processing the conversation. ‘Beau would never do that. She’s stronger than that!’

  
  


Fjord didn’t want to believe it either, but it did make sense. Why else would the angel have spared her? ‘It would…’ He gave Jester an apologetic look. ‘It would explain why they didn’t kill her.’

  
  


Jester did not talk to him for the rest of the evening.

  
  


Eventually, though, they had to leave. While the Cobalt Soul did have some sway here, it was a bit much to ask for the four of them to stay overnight. At best, they were allowed one, and that had only been after Fjord explained the possibility that someone might be coming to try and finish what they had started. It wasn’t entirely a lie.

  
  


‘I will stay,’ Caleb announced, before either Fjord or Jester could stay anything. If Caleb was staying, Fjord knew that Veth would more than likely hide underneath the bed, and pretend like she wasn’t there. Personally, Fjord thought it was an excellent idea. The more protection Beau had, the better.

  
  


Fjord and Jester returned to the Cobalt Soul. Jester hadn’t quite forgiven Fjord, but she was at least willing to speak to him as they walked. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get through my whole shift, knowing that Beau could be in danger.’

  
  


‘Well I don’t think our stakeout’s going ahead tonight,’ Fjord commented. ‘Not with Caleb standing guard at the hospital. If you’d like, I could come and keep you company. Give some sort of distraction.’

  
  


Jester brightened up almost immediately. ‘Only if you let me paint your nails!’

  
  


It was a trap, and Fjord knew it was a trap, but on the whole, he was willing to do what it took to keep both his own and Jester’s mind off of things. Plus, he didn’t look half bad with painted nails.

  
  


The medical office was quiet. Fjord wasn’t sure if there were any missions on the books tonight, but if there were, they were apparently going smoothly enough.

  
  


‘Close your eyes,’ Jester told him. Fjord opened his mouth to argue, but then decided against it. He closed his eyes, and put his hands over the top, for good measure. When he opened them, Jester had brought out an enormous box of hidden pastries and confectionery, some of which looked like it might have been there a while. Jester picked up a moldy cupcake, and took an experimental nibble out of it. ‘Ew.’

  
  


Fjord took a large donut that looked reasonably fresh, at least compared to the rest of it. It didn’t taste too bad, either.

  
  


‘Now!’ Jester put her hands on the table. ‘What color do you want your nails?’

  
  


‘You pick,’ Fjord told her. ‘You have much better fashion sense than I do.’ Jester was currently wearing a bright pink pinafore dress with a green vest on top.

  
  


Jester picked a bright blue that was not too far off her skin tone. She was halfway through Fjord’s left hand (the crying having slowed down considerably), when the medical office phone rang.

  
  


‘Oh, pooey.’ Jester pouted. She put the lid of the nail polish back on, and went to pick up the phone. Another second after that, she held it out to Fjord. ‘It’s for you,’ she said.

  
  


Surprised, Fjord took the phone. ‘This is Fjord.’

  
  


‘ _Mr. Fjord, this is Bryce in security._ ’ Fjord had to think for a moment before he remembered the blond-haired half-elf. He quite liked them, even if he didn’t know them very well. ‘ _There’s a...well, there’s a vampire down here, looking to speak to whoever’s in charge._ ’

  
  


‘Dairon…’

  
  


‘ _Dairon is in a teleconference with the High Curator,_ ’ Bryce told him. ‘ _Most of the Expositors are in the field. I’m told that you’re the highest ranking person on site._ ’

  
  


‘...okay,’ Fjord said. ‘I...will be there shortly.’

  
  


_Fuck._

  
  


‘Did something happen?’ Jester asked. She had been leaning in, trying to eavesdrop on the conversation, but apparently Bryce was soft-spoken enough that she hadn’t picked up on anything. ‘Should I get my ax?’

  
  


‘Sure,’ Fjord told her. It couldn’t hurt, after all.

  
  


They made their way down to building security. Bryce gave an appraising sort of look to Jester, and to her ax.

  
  


‘For my protection,’ Fjord said, smoothly. Bryce nodded. They knew better than to argue. They led Fjord and Jester to an interrogation room with a two-way mirror. Fjord always loved getting to use these things. Sitting at the table, hands cuffed, and looking beat to shit was an extravagant purple tiefling. He was a dead ringer (no pun intended) for the demon vampire that had been on Beau’s wall of crazy. “Molly,” the label had said.

  
  


‘You know,’ the tiefling called out, ‘I would have dressed a little more appropriately if I knew I was getting handcuffed straight away.’ His left eye was swollen shut, but the right eye, Fjord could see, was a solid red. In spite of all of that, though, there was a sort of carelessness to his posture, as though this was just a game to him.

  
  


‘I’m going to talk to him,’ he told Bryce, who gestured to the door.

  
  


‘Feel free,’ they said.

  
  


Molly shifted his posture when Fjord entered the room, giving as appraising of a look as he could with one and a half black eyes. ‘I didn’t even have to ask, and they sent in the cute one.’ He winked. Fjord was mildly taken aback, which he assumed was the point. He sat down in the chair opposite the tiefling.

  
  


‘I was told you wanted to speak to whoever was in charge.’

  
  


‘Is that you?’ the tiefling asked, shrewdly. ‘You don’t look like upper management. They generally tend to look like they’ve got a stick up their arse.’ There was a mild accent there that was a bit like his own (real) accent.

  
  


‘Right now, I’m the closest you’re going to get.’ Fjord kept his voice even. If this... _thing_ had something to do with why Beau was in hospital, on a ventilator...well, things could get messy. ‘You showed up on _our_ doorstep, right after your people almost killed one of my friends, so tell me, _Molly_ , what do you want?’

  
  


‘My name is Mollymauk Tealeaf,’ the tiefling said, palms up in a gesture of surrender, the chain between the cuffs tightening. ‘I need your help.’


	17. Why you’ve given in to all these…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The long awaited "Dairon does their paperwork" chapter.

XVII-Why you’ve given in to all these…

_Seven_ _years ago_

_Zadash_

  
  


For the first time in Dairon’s stint as an Expositor with the Cobalt Soul, the library had failed her.

  
  


Granted, she had only been an Expositor for three years, and the library itself was a satellite of the main library in town. There were constant calls to merge the two branches, so that Expositors in the middle of hunting down deadly beasts were not required to take a tram through a zombie-riddled part of town, just to confirm some facts.

  
  


There was a serial killer in Zadash. At least, that was what Dairon suspected. Serial killing was generally well outside the purview of the Soul, but given some of the arcane curiosities found at the crime scenes, the police had been hesitant to talk to the Cerberus Assembly. The Soul didn’t have as much experience in practicing the arcane, but were generally very well-read on the theory.

  
  


The satellite library, that all of the Expositors worked out of, was paltry when it came to matters of the arcane. If Dairon had any chance of being able to decode the symbols that she had found, then it would be at the main library.

  
  


Dairon went there late on a Grissen evening. This would be a much smoother process if they weren’t disturbed; the last thing they needed was some fresh-faced trainee that had never met an Expositor in their lives asking too many questions.

  
  


Thankfully, it was mostly quiet. At this time of night, most of the Archivists had gone home. At the counter, a teenage girl was arguing with Zeenoth. Too young to be an Archivist, Dairon thought, but then, they always had trouble with estimating human ages. There was a large bruise on her face, which wasn’t uncommon with the trainees, but then, this girl did not look like a Cobalt Soul trainee. She was far too young, for one thing, and for better or for worse, the girl’s very poor posture would have been something that the trainers would have ironed out very quickly.

  
  


‘—don’t see why my opinion is somehow worth _less_ than anyone else’s.’

  
  


Zeenoth’s reply was calm enough that Dairon couldn’t quite get all of it, but she did manage to pick up on a few scattered words. “Court-ordered,” was the main one that caused a raised eyebrow. But that was none of Dairon’s business.

  
  


She found a table at the back of the library, and put her things there. There were a few books they would need to look for, on sigils, and arcane symbols, and magical rituals in general.

  
  


It was, admittedly, slow going. That was the problem with arcane imagery. If you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for, then it would take a significant amount of browsing to find it.

  
  


‘Is there something you need help with, Expositor?’ Zeenoth’s soft voice jerked Dairon from the midst of a passage on the summoning of demons. This would, perhaps go a little quicker if they had some help. After all, the Archivists had a much deeper knowledge of the library and its contents than Dairon ever would. She had far more practical experience.

  
  


‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ Dairon said, crisply. To her surprise, Zeenoth turned to the girl.

  
  


‘Beauregard, if you wouldn’t mind assisting Expositor Dairon with their research.’ The girl rolled her eyes, clearing figuring out just as quickly as Dairon that Zeenoth was merely attempting to distract her.

  
  


In spite of herself, Dairon was curious. The girl came over to their table, and sat down in a slight huff, though Dairon couldn’t help but notice that she seemed just as relieved to be away from Zeenoth as Zeenoth did from her. Clearly not a match made in Elysium.

  
  


‘You are not a trainee,’ Dairon said. It wasn’t a question. She wasn’t judging, but somehow her tone always seemed to come off as judgmental.

  
  


‘Not really, no.’ Beauregard shrugged. ‘I’m on a work transition program from juvenile detention,’ she said. ‘The moment they’ve signed the paperwork that says I’ve done my however the fuck many hours of vocational training, they’ll kick me to the curb, and find some poor new scrub to re-alphabetize the books on early post-calamity erotic pottery.’

  
  


Dairon stifled a slight chuckle. ‘What did you do?’ they asked.

  
  


‘Oh.’ The girl looked crestfallen. As though she got asked this sort of question a lot. ‘I was sort of on my way to establishing a vast criminal empire.’ Surprisingly, she wasn’t lying. Or, at the very least, was only exaggerating a little bit.

  
  


‘Really?’ Dairon was actually intrigued. The girl spoke in a tone that suggested that she had clearly been very well educated, but chose not to use that education. At least not in the ways that people expected her to. Not that it meant much. Dairon knew some very well-spoken people who were actually idiots.

  
  


‘Oh, sure. Selling bootleg wine, and suude. Good business, too. Anyway, what are you looking for? I’ve re-shelved every fucking book in this library a hundred times, so I should be able to help.’ Again, not lying. Interesting.

  
  


‘I am looking for information on some arcane symbols.’ Dairon showed the top page of the notes that she had taken from the most recent crime scene. Beauregard looked at it for several long seconds. Finally, she said:

  
  


‘I’ve seen that sigil before. Hold on, let me find the book.’ She dashed off to the general arcana section, and returned five minutes later with a very large tome on the planes of existence.’ She flipped to a page near the back, revealing a sigil that was not too far off the one that Dairon had sketched.

  
  


Beau looked between them. ‘It’s not exactly the same.’ She pointed to the sketch. ‘I think this one might have been modified for use within a pocket dimension. See the extra writing along the edge there?’

  
  


Dairon stared at her. ‘You are how old?’

  
  


Beau blushed. ‘Almost seventeen.’

  
  


‘Do you have any formal magical training?’

  
  


‘No, I just...I like to read. Find problems and figure shit out, y’know? From like…ten o’clock most nights there’s hardly anyone in here, so Zeenoth lets me browse. They don’t really have any books at the detentions center that aren’t shitty romance novels, and I’m not allowed to take any with me from here.’ The look on her face suggested that this was a greater affront than anything else that had happened in her life.

  
  


Dairon nodded. They knew. In many ways, Dairon was reminded of a young elf, almost a century ago, filled with fire and bluster, and an insatiable curiosity. She had, of course, mellowed considerably since then.

  
  


Now that they had seen the sigil, the rest of the symbols clicked into place a little easier. Their serial killer wasn’t killing people at all. He was trapping them in pocket dimensions.

  
  


Interesting.

  
  


‘Thank-you very much for your help, Beauregard,’ Dairon said.

  
  


‘No trouble.’ There was a sort of strain to her voice, as she added. ‘If you need any more help, you know...just call out.’

  
  


Dairon nodded. She was pretty sure she had it from here.

  
  


_Present Day_

_Zadash_

  
  


The high curator was, in a word, livid. Before Dairon could even finished explaining to him what had happened, he had been calling for Beauregard to be stripped of her title, and decommissioned as an agent of the Cobalt Soul. Dairon had just about managed to talk him down, convince him that as an Expositor, Beauregard went above and beyond the expectations of her station to obtain information and intelligence.

  
  


It wasn’t a lie, by any means. Beauregard was one of the more resourceful Expositors, and she was not afraid to skirt the letter of the law to get her job done. While Dairon was almost certain that Beauregard had not been using sex to get information, for some strange (horrifying) reason, that played much better with the high curator than “Beauregard has a life outside of work in which she occasionally makes stupid decisions.”

  
  


That said, Dairon did not have time to dwell on the situation. The message that had popped up on her computer screen in the middle of the teleconference told her that one of the vampires in question was downstairs in one of the interrogation rooms.

  
  


Dairon _had_ planned on going back the hospital, but this certainly changed matters. If the vampire had information on who had attacked Beauregard, or if he himself had been responsible, then they definitely wanted to know about it. By the time they made it down there, Fjord was a reasonable way into the interrogation.

  
  


‘—okay, for one thing, I didn’t _touch_ your friend. That was a guy named Obann. He’s...I guess you’d call him my boss? Not by choice, though. He’s a fiend, and he has access to mind control powers. He’s the one that hurt your friend. Him, and his little assassin friend.’ _Assassin friend._ That could have been the Inevitable End, the one who Beau had been researching and who had ended up in Beau’s research notes. Obann, though, was a new name. ‘Anyway, Yasha – that’s the angel – she saved your friend’s life, dropped her off at the hospital, all that stuff.’

  
  


‘Why?’ Fjord asked. The tiefling seemed to eye Fjord skeptically, as though figuring out what he knew.

  
  


‘I think you know why,’ he said, finally. Interesting. ‘Once Obann discovered that Yasha was being a little less than honest about her nighttime activities, he put her under his control fully. I want your help to get her out of there.’

  
  


And there it was.

  
  


The tiefling seemed sincere, which was very interesting, because there was not a single thing about his personality or overall demeanor that event suggested sincerity. In fact, Dairon’s first thought would have been that he was trying to scam them all, trying to lure them into a trap.

  
  


When he spoke of Yasha – of the angel – there was genuine distress in his voice. This was evidently someone that he cared about deeply. Someone that even Beauregard had fallen under the sway of. Not that Beauregard was immune to charm. In fact, if there was one thing that Beauregard did very well, it was care deeply even when she pretended that she didn’t. Of course, there were many things that Beauregard did very well.

  
  


‘Why should we help you?’ Fjord asked. It was a fair question, but it seemed to frustrate the tiefling.

  
  


‘Uh, maybe so you can, I don’t know, take down a very powerful vampire demon? Put a nice feather in your cap. But if that’s not enough, how about stopping him from trying to bring back a Betrayer God.’

  
  


Dairon stared at the wall. ‘Fuck,’ she said.

  
  


Fjord clearly decided that he was in well over his head, because he immediately called a stop to the interrogation. ‘I’m going to have to have a chat with my supervisor,’ he said. ‘But we’ll see what we can do.’ To Dairon’s surprise, the tiefling didn’t argue. He was told he would be brought to a cell with reasonably comfortable amenities “until we can figure out what the fuck to do with you,” and instead of resisting, he seemed relieved.

  
  


‘If they know I’m here, they’re going to send someone to kill me,’ he said. ‘How thick are your floors?’

  
  


Dairon turned to Bryce. ‘Keep an eye on him,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go have _another_ chat to the high curator.’

  
  


Had there not been rules about interrogations, and the number of time suspects (even vampires) could be interrogated in one day, Dairon would have spoken to the tiefling herself. Perhaps it would be best to let him stew for a bit, to see if his answers were still the same when morning came around.

  
  


For Dairon, though, the night had only just begun.

...

_Six years ago_

_Zadash_

  
  


Dairon was driving when her phone rang.

  
  


It was a private number, which was interesting, but not unheard of. Many of the sort of people that became Cobalt Soul informants didn’t want anything traced back to them. Dairon answered it, one hand still on the steering wheel.

  
  


‘This is Expositor Dairon.’

  
  


‘ _Oh, hey. Yeah, my name is, ah...Beauregard. We met about six months ago at the Cobalt Soul library.’_ Dairon remembered. The trainee that had been surprisingly knowledgeable about arcane symbols. Dairon wondered how she had gotten their phone number. Perhaps Zeenoth had given it to her. ‘ _Anyway, I don’t know if this is in your wheelhouse or whatever, but I came across something that’s kind of_ _weird_ _._ ’ Dairon _was_ interested. The case that she had been working on when she’d met Beauregard had been dormant for some time, in spite of the assistance. If the person that they were tracking had started up again...well, that wasn’t good news.

  
  


‘What did you find?’

  
  


‘ _Uh, some similar, but like...half-finished symbols, plus a whole bunch of blood._ ’

  
  


‘Give me the address.’ The things she was working on now were far less important than if someone was trapping people in pocket dimensions again. The address that Beauregard gave was about fifteen minutes away. ‘Stay there, I will be there shortly.’

  
  


Traffic wasn’t too bad, so it only took ten minutes. Beauregard was standing at the entrance to an alleyway, shivering in a tattered looking coat. ‘Beauregard,’ Dairon greeted her.

  
  


‘Hey, D—Expositor. It’s, ah...it’s just down here.’ Strangely, Beauregard seemed a little nervous, perhaps as though she thought that Dairon might accuse her of having something to do with whatever was going on.

  
  


The scene was a bit of a mess. There _were_ symbols there, drawn in blood, but it was animal blood. The symbols themselves _were_ similar, but had nothing to do with trapping people in pocket dimensions. Something to be concerned about, perhaps, but not related to what Dairon was looking for. Even still, they took several dozen photos, and called in a clean-up crew to collect evidence. After that, she turned her attention to something that was a much more pressing issue.

  
  


Beauregard.

  
  


She looked, in a word, rough. Once again, her face was covered in bruises, and beneath the coat, her clothes looked well-worn and a little torn.

  
  


Dairon got the distinct impression that Beauregard had been sleeping in these alleyways, rather than simply just walking down them.

  
  


‘You are no longer at the Soul.’ It wasn’t a question.

  
  


‘No, I, uh…left once I got out of detention.’ Dairon was familiar with the work transition programs, and their lack of obligation to provide ongoing employment after release. Clearly in a situation like this it was hardly the best outcome.

  
  


‘Do you have family?’

  
  


‘Who do you think got me locked up in the first place?’ There was a moment of awkward silence. The conversation had taken a sudden turn into the personal and the emotional, neither of which were areas that Dairon was particularly good at navigating. But, they couldn’t let such obvious talent squander. What would Beauregard be able to accomplish, given the opportunity? If someone encouraged her eagerness, and tended her bright spark, rather than fought to quash it.

  
  


Dairon nodded. ‘Right.’ She made a decision. ‘Come with me.’

  
  


Beauregard hesitated. But, the icy wind, and the fact that she clearly hadn’t had a proper meal in days won out. She got into the passenger’s seat of Dairon’s car.

  
  


‘I...thanks,’ Beauregard said.

  
  


Dairon permitted herself to give a very small smile. ‘Do not thank me just yet,’ she said.

  
  


_Present Day_

_Zadash_

  
  


It was almost two in the morning by the time Dairon made it back to the hospital. Funnily enough, the paperwork involved for “Expositor getting eviscerated by vampires” was extensive, and the high curator had been very, very grumpy to be updated yet again on the situation, even if the outcome was...well, part positive, part negative. Positive, in that they had some new information, negative in that “trying to bring back a Betrayer God” was hardly good news.

  
  


Caleb Widogast was standing at the door of the room, which meant that Veth couldn’t be all that far away. Interesting. Dairon had perhaps expected him to be sitting by Beauregard’s side. But then, perhaps with Widogast’s history, he was not a great fan of places such as these.

  
  


‘How has it been?’

  
  


‘All quiet. She is still asleep. The doctor has told us that it could be minutes or days before she wakes up.’ Dairon nodded.

  
  


‘Go home and get some sleep. Both of you. I will sit with her for a while.’ Caleb raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. Dairon pulled back her jacket to show him the weapon on her hip. If anything happened, she was well-prepared to deal with it.

  
  


For the first hour or so, nothing did happen. Dairon sat in the chair at Beauregard’s bedside, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest. She looked, for all the world, like that same teenager that Dairon had met at the Cobalt Soul library all those years ago, the teenager that had been kicked around by the world, wanting nothing more than to make something of herself.

  
  


Though no longer seventeen, Beauregard was still a young woman, albeit a remarkable, head-strong and driven one. For all that, though, there was something so sad in her eyes whenever Dairon spoke to her. Not for the first time, Dairon wondered if they had done the right thing. Not in helping Beauregard, but in guiding her along this path. This path where, frankly, work-life balance was not encouraged.

  
  


‘You will be alright,’ they said, a directive as much as it was an attempt to convince themself. Beauregard would be alright.

  
  


Around three-thirty, Dairon heard the noise. It wasn’t much; it could have been the scraping of a chair, or a foot against linoleum floor. Something about it, though...Dairon stood, drawing her weapon. Though the lights in the room were off, outside Zadash was bright with twinkling neon. They leveled their gun around the room.

  
  


There was nothing.

  
  


Then, suddenly, as though from nowhere, a knife-wielding figure burst from the floor. Dairon just barely had time to notice flaming red hair, and purple-black Drow skin before the knife curved downwards into her chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up, a journey into the fractured, comatose psyche of Beauregard Lionett.


	18. ...reckless dark desires

XVIII - …reckless dark desires

_It was a beautiful day._

  
  


_The sky was big, and blue, and clear; not a single cloud could be seen. It was unusual, for the Iothia Moorlands. Usually, it was muggy and gloomy with no brightness._

  
  


_Yasha was not expected to hunt today; they took it in turns, and today it was her turn to relax, and to allow her wounds to heal. Just last week, an enormous boar had gored her across the thigh. There had been so much blood, and the healers had worked quickly to wrap the wound. Even still, there was a little bit of infection._

  
  


_Yasha didn’t know much about that sort of thing at all. She knew about killing things, of course, but not about healing them. Zuala was much better at that sort of thing._

  
  


_Speaking of Zuala…_

  
  


_Yasha made her way across the vale. Hardly anyone from the tribe came out this far; from the moment of birth, it had been drilled into them. If you stray from the tribe, you will be in danger from the ones that would seek to harm us. By the time Yasha had realized the reasoning for their lies, she had been old enough to kill anyone that would have tried to harm her._

  
  


_Orphanmaker, they called her, for all the mothers and fathers she had slaughtered. They would never call her “Bringer of Flowers,” or “Climber of Trees.” She would always be Orphanmaker._

  
  


_Yasha climbed the hill, sweating, and aching. Underneath the tree, so far from the encampment of the tribe, Zuala waited._

  
  


‘ _You are so slow today!’ Zuala laughed. ‘Even a child could have beaten you here.’_

  
  


‘ _If you are unhappy with me here, I will return and send a child in my place.’ Yasha smiled. She would not leave; could not leave. Zuala was her…Zuala was her everything._

  
  


‘ _I would knock you to the ground before you could take a single step,’ Zuala said, and as if to prove it, she dove for Yasha. Yasha sidestepped easily, one arm out to catch Zuala. They both fell to the ground, wrapped up in each other, laughing until they cried._

  
  


_Yasha’s heart had never felt so full_.

  
  


She blinked, and Zuala was gone.

  
  


Confused, she stood, looking around for where her beloved had gone. But no. That wasn’t right. Zuala wasn’t…

  
  


She turned, and saw herself across the way. No. Not herself.

  
  


Yasha.

  
  


She wasn’t Yasha, she was Beauregard. Beauregard Lionett, twenty-four years old, perpetual disappointment. Yasha was…

  
  


She looked far more relaxed, far more peaceful than Beau had ever seen her in life. Instead of the muscle shirt and jeans she had been wearing the first time Beau had seen her, Yasha was wearing a tunic that laced up her chest. Instead of dark, skeletal wings, the wings were enormous, and fluffy and white. She, too, was looking off in the distance, as though she had just lost sight of someone.

  
  


‘Yasha,’ Beau called out, and Yasha turned. She looked...was that relief? She looked relieved to see Beau, but at the same time, hesitant.

  
  


‘Beauregard.’ Beau’s name on the angel’s lips was the most beautiful thing that Beau had ever heard. ‘I am sorry. Please forgive me for what I did...I can’t…I did not have control of myself.’

  
  


‘No, I know,’ Beau said, immediately. She wasn’t sure if she _did_ know, but now that the angel had said it, it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. Vampires and demons, after all, had no shortage of abilities to charm, and trick, and control. ‘Is this...am I dead?’

  
  


‘I don’t think so,’ Yasha said, smiling lightly. ‘I think...this is my memory of things that happened a very long time ago.’

  
  


‘Am I actually here?’ Beau frowned. ‘Are _you_ actually here?’ Yasha smile turned sad, and Beau got the immediate impression that this Yasha was nothing more than a figment of her (admittedly overactive) imagination. ‘What do I do?’

  
  


Yasha seemed to have frozen, that sad smile the only thing that Beau could think of, as the angel faded away, and the Iothia Moorlands around her. Soon, there was nothing left but an inky blackness. Even the ground had gone.

Beau drifted along on a sea of stars, endless void in front of her. She was asleep, or...or something else. Lost in the throes of her own psyche, dreaming memories that weren’t hers. Though everything was blurry, that was what felt the most clear.

  
  


Her own memories were far more muddled, far more confusing.

  
  


A little girl trapped inside a big house. Being scolded for going outside, to talking to the riff-raff of the town. _The Mudfields is not where you should be spending your time, Beauregard_ , her father would say. _The people that live there aren’t_ our _kind of people._

  
  


At the time, Beau had been far too young to realize what that meant, what he was saying. If people were nice, that meant they were the right kind of people, didn’t it? It wasn’t until later that Beau realized just how embarrassed her father was of his own inauspicious past. How he would not tell stories of his own youth, because they didn’t involve money, or fame, or prosperity.

  
  


Not that many stories were told in the Lionett household. Fiction, too, seemed to be something that her parents frowned upon. The books she was forced to read were books about business, and economics, and wine-making. Even her preferred subjects of history and cool magical shit was seen as a soft, useless area of research. Beau had been forced to steal library books on mermaids and wars and pirate ships, just so she could read what she wanted to. Ironically, it wasn’t until she’d been arrested, and put into juvenile detention, that she found any freedom from his suffocating oppression. Wasn’t until someone saw through her mask, and gave her a fucking chance.

  
  


The trip back to Dairon’s place, after the alleyway, was one of the more awkward conversations that Beau had ever had. She was grateful, of course, that she was out of that fucking wind, but...well, she didn’t want to intrude on the hospitality of someone that had a less than warm reputation. Zeenoth and the other Archivists had talked about it, after Dairon had left the library the first time Beau had met them. Beau shrugged. ‘I thought she seemed okay,’ she remembered saying. The look on Zeenoth’s face wasn’t too hard to interpret. “Of course _you’d_ get along with them.”

  
  


Dairon took her to an all-night diner, gave her some gloves, and a scarf, and some warm socks. Once upon a time, Beau would have refused on principle, but she had spent the last six weeks freezing herself to sleep every night. The mere fact that someone _cared_ was enough for Beau to let her guard down just a little.

  
  


‘I don’t think I ever thanked you properly when you helped me,’ Dairon said, as Beau slurped up her third bowl of soup. Dairon had a plain black coffee in front of them, and didn’t seem overly concerned about finishing it. ‘We were able to find some of the people that we thought were dead, trapped in pocket dimensions.’

  
  


Beau felt herself grow warm, and it had nothing to do with the soup, or the gloves. ‘I…you know, it’s just reading and stuff. It’s not doing anything special like you do.’

  
  


‘Would you like to?’ Dairon asked. Beau frowned. ‘Become an Expositor, that is. I know you enjoy the research, but being an Expositor is a little more than just books. If it’s something you were interested in, I can make that happen.’

  
  


Beau stared at her. She had no idea what to say.

  
  


‘I mean…I don’t think I’m the sort of person that does that sort of thing.’ She gestured to her shitty coat, and the backpack that held just about everything in the world that she owned. ‘I mean, for one thing, they tend to have...like, places to live, right?’

  
  


‘Well there is a salary,’ Dairon commented. ‘Even for trainees. And the mere fact that you were instrumental in a previous Cobalt Soul case merits, in my opinion, a consultant’s fee. The standard rate is about two-hundred and fifty gold an hour.’ Beau had no idea what Dairon meant by that, until they handed her a check for a thousand gold at the end of the evening.

  
  


‘I don’t…’ Beau stuttered. ‘I can’t….I don’t have a bank account,’ she finished, lamely.

  
  


Dairon looked mildly surprised. ‘Well, I think that is something that could be arranged. You know,’ they continued. ‘The Cobalt Soul has arrangements with some of the universities in the area. Reduced fees on certain courses. If that is something you were interested in doing.’

  
  


Beau was interested. College was something that, in her wildest dreams, she’d never expected she’d be in the position to do. At least not in the way that _she_ wanted to do it. Before The Incident, her father had been insistent on her attending business school, but then T.J. had been born, and in the space of nine months, Beau had gone to begrudgingly useful to a thorn in her father’s side. She couldn’t even begin to express how happy it would make her to become something of herself in a way that didn’t have a godsdamned thing to do with him.

  
  


But maybe not right away.

  
  


Beau started work. She got a shitty little apartment that she could just about afford, and started filling out the forms that she needed to get a godsdamned degree. It was an empowering feeling. It was an amazing feeling. It was something that all but came crashing down when she found the bit of paper in her financial aid packet that needed a signature from someone she’d hoped never to see again.

  
  


Because apparently, it was a given that people’s parents helped them out. Would chuck a few gold to their struggling children when they needed it.

Thoreau Lionett was, in short, an asshole. ‘Look all you have to do is sign the fucking paper saying that I am no longer dependent on you for anything, and you’ll never have to speak with me again.’

  
  


‘You know, I don’t think I’m particularly comfortable doing things that you’re swearing at me to try and get.’

  
  


Beau was fuming. ‘Gods forbid I want to make something of myself, or do any fucking thing that doesn’t have a godsdamned thing to do with you, you selfish piece of shit.’

  
  


Her father stepped forward, fist clenched. For half a second, Beau was sure that he was about to slap her again. ‘I think you should leave,’ he said, evenly. Beau scrunched the form into a ball, and threw it at him.

  
  


‘If you ever feel like not being a dick,’ she spat, and left without another backwards glance. She half wanted to stop at the _Gemmed Hearth_ for a drink, but every single thing about this place made her sick to her stomach. She didn’t want to spend a second here that she didn’t have to.

  
  


So her dad wasn’t going to sign the paperwork. It was what she had expected, even if maybe a small part of her had hoped that being free of her would make him less of a dick. But no. She never should have expected that he would do anything so progressive as change his opinion.

  
  


Well...it all around sucked. The Cobalt Soul had deals with the universities, but that was only a minor subsidy. She still had to pay her course fees which, without her father signing the form to say she was an independent, were going to be thousands of thousands of gold. There were student loans, at least, but those would take years to pay off.

  
  


If the alternative, though, was to spend another godsdamned night sleeping in a cardboard box, eating people’s leftover pizza crusts...well, there wasn’t much of a choice. If she wanted to make something of herself, the Cobalt Soul was the perfect place to do it, and if she wanted to be as usefully as she could possibly be, then she needed a degree, or at least something so that people wouldn’t look at her like she was just some kid that Dairon picked up off the street.

  
  


There was no greater desire in the world that Beau had than to prove herself. And maybe for someone to share her bed with her at night, but then, maybe those two things were kind of linked. After all, no-one would ever love her if she wasn’t...worth something.

  
  


Kamordah bled away, only to be replaced once more by that inky darkness. Beau sort of floated there for what could have been a few minutes, or for a hundred thousand years. Time didn’t seem to mean much anymore. If this was the afterlife, then it fucking _sucked_.

  
  


Finally, though, things began to reform, into something that was utterly alien, utterly unfamiliar. She could feel her horns and her wings and her tail coming in, until she become someone else, some _thing_ else.

  
  


_The Abyss_ _was a dark, and miserable, and altogether desolate place. A place where the strong pushed the weak down into the muck, where alliances were convenient, and the weak-willed did not last long before their minds became lost and twisted._

  
  


_Obann walked the mirrored hallways of the ivory-towered palace. Whichever way he looked, he saw his red, cambion form staring back at him, nervous in spite of himself. As Master of Wills, he did not usually get nervous. Did not get scared, or tired, or anything like that. But, anyone called to the halls of the Argent Palace was well within their rights to be a little on edge, especially with the number of cloaked, soul-sucking bodaks that wandered the halls._

  
  


_But when Graz’zt called, only a fool would ignore the summons._

  
  


_The demon was nine feet tall, skin of polished obsidian. Obann kneeled. ‘My lord Graz’zt,’ he said. The Dark Prince gave him a brief, withering stare before he returned to examining his finely manicured fingernails. Like Obann, Graz’zt had once been a devil, but after conquering_ _Zelatar_ _, and taking his throne in the Argent Palace, he had become corrupted by the chaotic nature of the Abyss. ‘I have failed you. I cannot pierce the Divine Gate, and the Chained Oblivion remains trapped at the bottom of the Abyss. The Prime Deities are beyond even my power.’_

  
  


_Graz’zt did not look pleased. Though his fine coat, and expensive livery made him look a being that could be reasoned with, he was just as chaotic, just as vindictive as any other demon in the Abyss. ‘You have failed me for the last time, Obann,’ the demon lord said. ‘We shall see how well you can fulfill your goals while banished to the Material Plane.’_

  
  


_Before Obann could protest, could make a case in his defense, he found himself ripped from the Abyss, his body scattering into a hundred thousand pieces, each one of them screaming in agony._

  
  


_When he landed, reformed, composed himself, Obann got to his feet. The ground beneath him was cracked and dry, but the sky was of the brightest blue. Definitely not anything like what the skies in the Abyss, or indeed any of the Fiendish Planes._

  
  


_Graz'zt had been true to his threat. How very devilish of him._

  
  


_Obann stared up at the sky in disgust. He had never much liked the Material Plane. Too many humans, for one thing._

  
  


_But, if he was going to release Tharizdun from his shackles and bring the Abyss to_ _its_ _knees, bring Graz’zt to his knees, then...well, this was the best place to do it._

  
  


The blue skies stayed, and Beau was grateful. She kind of wished there was ocean, though, and the moment that thought crossed her mind, she heard the waves. Crashing, rolling, thundering into shore. In and out. Dependable. Calming. Certainly nothing like her.

  
  


‘ _Hang in there, first mate_.’

  
  


Beau could hear their voices. Some more muted than others, and some as clear as day, as though they were talking to her, and yet try as she might, she couldn’t respond.

  
  


That was the annoying thing. She was trapped in the endless void of her own mind, and the only thing that just managed to pierce through was the sound of people loving her, caring for her.

  
  


It was still such a new feeling. One that Beau had never felt in her life until Dairon had help pull her from the darkness. She wasn’t entirely sure that she was exactly where she wanted to be, but at least she wasn’t _there_.

  
  


‘ _You will be alright,’_ Dairon’s voice said, and it sounded like an order. An order that Beau very much wanted to follow.

  
  


There were so many things she wanted to say, but couldn’t. Not least of all because she was lying in a hospital bed, semi-aware, but unable to pull herself from what was akin to a serious fucking drug trip. Things like, ‘ _Thanks for being the first person to ever believe in me,_ ’ and ‘ _I’m sorry I fucked it all up._ ’

  
  


A strange sense of foreboding overcame Beau. She had been trapped in this void of her own fucked up psyche for Ioun knows how long, and though she had tried to escape, nothing seemed to penetrate the darkness.

  
  


Now, though...Now, she could hear the sound of beeping, the sound of voices over an intercom. The sound of...screaming?

  
  


Who was screaming? Was it someone that she…

  
  


No. Beau wouldn’t let that happen.

  
  


She couldn’t let that happen.

  
  


_Wake the fuck up,_ Beau screamed inside her head.

  
  


She woke up.

  
  


Everything hurt, that was the first thing she noticed. The second thing she noticed was a lithe, crouching figure, holding a dagger, ready to strike down on the unmoving figure below it. Dairon.

  
  


Out of the corner of her eye, Beau saw Dairon’s gun, lying on the ground, forgotten.

  
  


She dove for it, hands shaking as she picked it up. Her entire body was screaming at her for having thrown herself off the bed to the ground, but that hardly mattered. ‘Hey, fuckface,’ she said. The figure looked up, knife dripping with blood. Beau didn’t know who the fuck it was, but she did know that Dairon was in danger. ‘Burn in hell.’ Beau pulled the trigger three times.

  
  


The figure tried to dodge out of the way, but wasn’t fast enough. One bullet struck her in the chest, and one struck her in the shoulder, and the last one hit right between the eyes. She fell to the ground, dead.

  
  


Beau dropped the gun. ‘Dairon,’ she muttered, and went straight to her boss’s – her mentor, her friend – side. Blood was flowing freely from the wound in their chest. Beau put her hands to it, helplessly, ineffectually. ‘Help!’ she called out. She didn’t quite have the strength to get up and go find someone, and the darkness of exhaustion was pressing in on her once more. Surely, someone would have heard the gunshots. ‘Somebody please help!’

  
  


The last thing she thought before darkness overtook her once more was that all of this mess was her fault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beau's psyche is a weird place.


	19. Disconnect and self-destruct

XIX - Disconnect and self-destruct

Beau didn’t know how long she was out for after that, but when she awoke, the sun was streaming in through the window, and she was back in her hospital bed. Everything still hurt like fuck, but her mind, for the first time in what felt like an eternity, was clear.

  
  


Clear enough, at least, that she remembered what had happened. Remembered getting stabbed in the gut by the angel – by Yasha – and then in turn being almost drained of life by Obann. Just barely remembered being gently lowered into a bathtub, and having someone care for her wounds. Yasha hadn’t _wanted_ to stab her in the gut. Something had overtaken her mind. Obann, more than likely.

  
  


It was a lot to think about.

  
  


‘Morning, princess.’ The voice was gruff, but familiar, and certainly not the one that Beau had expected to hear first thing on waking from a coma.

  
  


‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Beau muttered. She opened her eyes to a ruddy dwarven face with a five o’clock shadow, and a cigarette pinned behind her ear.

  
  


‘You need to update your emergency contact,’ Keg said, simply. She didn’t look entirely impressed with having been dragged out to the hospital, but then, she had still done it, so that was something.

  
  


‘Oh.’ Beau thought on that for a moment. ‘Sorry.’ She was pretty sure she didn’t _have_ anyone else to use as an emergency contact. Literally everyone else in her life that she cared about, that she would consider close enough to even _be_ an emergency contact worked at the Soul. Shit. Maybe Dairon would do it.

  
  


_Dairon...Dairon...Something about Dairon._

  
  


FUCK.

  
  


Beau’s memory of the previous night hit her all at once. ‘Is Dairon—Shit. What the fuck happened?’

  
  


‘Dairon, they’re what, your boss, right?’ Beau nodded. ‘They’re alright. Well, they’re alive, at least. Clerics are doing what they can, but it was a poisoned dagger, so it might take a bit of something. More importantly, though, your friends are here.’

  
  


She went out to get them. She’d barely been in the hallway half a second before Jester came barreling in, followed closely by Fjord, Caleb and Veth.

  
  


Jester was very clearly suppressing the urge to run and hug Beau, and Beau was very grateful. She was pretty sure the slightest amount of pressure would cause her body to break.

  
  


More to the point, though, Beau had no idea what they knew. Hell, she wasn’t even sure what _she_ knew. Shit, that reminded her.

  
  


‘Can you get me some paper?’ Beau asked. It was clearly not the first words that they had expected from her, but this was important. Beau wasn’t surprised when it was Caleb that handed it over, along with a pencil that was a little under two inches long. Caleb had a very frustrating habit of using pencils for as long as possible.

  
  


Already, the things she’d seen were starting to slip away, but the memories she’d dreamed had never been so vivid, so visceral. She felt like she could have reached out and touched Zuala, could remember every strand of her golden yellow hair, could count all the freckles that had dotted her nose and her cheeks. Bright blue eyes that were a mirror to Beau’s own.

  
  


Even now, Beau still felt the residual warmth in her chest. Whoever Zuala had been, Yasha – the angel – had clearly loved her very much. Loved her enough to…to be breaking the rules? That was at least the impression Beau had gotten. It was like she had been inside Yasha’s head. It felt like an intrusion, but then, Yasha had seen Beau in a very vulnerable position, so she didn’t feel too guilty about it. Not to mention that Yasha had probably been dreaming Beau’s memories, too.

  
  


The location had been unfamiliar. It didn’t look like anything near Zadash, which wasn’t saying a lot. The few scraps of conversation that Beau had heard from Yasha definitely sounded accented, but it was an accent that she couldn’t place.

  
  


There were a couple of names that had stuck in her mind, apart from Zuala. The first was “Iothia Moorlands.” The second had been “Orphanmaker.”

  
  


Orphanmaker, Beau had no clue about, but the Iothia Moorlands hadn’t existed in over two hundred years. They had been drained, and became the foundation of the city of Ashwind, one of the bigger cities in the south of Xhorhas.

  
  


Whatever else that meant, Yasha was likely over two hundred years old.

  
  


Beau wasn’t exactly surprised. There were young vampires around, of course, but by its very nature, vampirism’s whole shtick (aside from the blood-sucking thing) was the immortality thing. Yasha could have been a thousand years old, and she would have looked exactly the same. The “angel” thing made that even more likely.

  
  


The demon’s memory – Obann’s memory – that one was going to be a lot harder. Not a lot was known about the Abyss. It’d take a lot of research to figure out exactly where he’d been, and the significance of who he was talking to. Even then, it might not even mean anything. He had clearly also been around for hundreds of years. Not that centuries meant much to demons or vampires.

  
  


Beau got through two sheets of paper, writing non-stop, before she finally looked up at her friends. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Blood memories, you know?’

  
  


They clearly didn’t know. Beau wasn’t even sure how much of a common knowledge thing it was, that blood-sharing sometimes ended up with memory sharing.

  
  


‘When someone drinks your blood,’ Beau explained. ‘Or when you drink their blood. Sometimes you get flashes of their memories, you know? I’m just trying to write down as much as I can remember.’

  
  


‘How do you know that?’ Veth asked, suspiciously, and thankfully, Fjord was quick enough on the uptake to provide a distraction.

  
  


‘Never mind that,’ he said, crisply. Beau gave him a tiny nod of thanks. ‘You almost _died_. It was insane.’

  
  


‘Yeah, I...did not think that one through.’ Beau frowned. That was putting it lightly. She had done probably the stupidest thing she’d ever done in her life, and that included agreeing to a dare from one of the town kids in Kamordah to touch the water coming out of one of the geysers. Beau’s left fingertips were still missing their prints.

  
  


‘How are you feeling?’ Caleb asked, lightly.

  
  


Beau chuckled. ‘Well, better than expected for having been eviscerated by a vampire demon.’ She looked at her arms, and found that they were covered in bandages. The still-healing bites beneath them itched. ‘Much worse than getting bitten by a zombie, that’s for sure.’ There was an awkward silence. ‘So what actually happened? How the fuck did I get here?’

  
  


‘Well, best we can tell, you got stabbed, and then kidnapped, and then sort of…’ Fjord hesitated.

  
  


‘Drained,’ Veth supplied, helpfully.

  
  


‘No, I mean, I remember that,’ Beau said, waving a hand, as though it didn’t matter. It _didn’t_ matter, really. Kidnapping was nothing compared to whatever else was going on. ‘But like...how did I get _here_?’ She got the impression that Obann wasn’t the kind of demon that would just let her go, especially not when she’d had a dream about _his_ past.

  
  


Fjord, on the whole, was an excellent liar, but over the years Beau had gotten pretty fucking good at telling truth from lie. Fjord hesitated before he answered, but when he did, his words were as smooth as ever. ‘Best we can tell, someone dropped you off at the hospital.’

  
  


‘Any idea who?’

  
  


‘We’re still working on that,’ he said, and that was _definitely_ a lie. It was weird. Beau had always felt like she was pretty close with Fjord. She was pretty sure he had never lied to her before. At least not about something that mattered.

  
  


In spite of every part of her screaming to call him on it, Beau didn’t. ‘Right,’ she said, slowly, and stretched out her aching muscles. ‘Ah, fuck!’ There was a tug of pain in her gut, but not from the stab wounds, or any of the vampire bites. It was the old zombie bite acting up again. She pulled up her shirt, and saw the telltale sign of necrosis that was just starting to recede again.

  
  


‘That’s why you’ve got to take it every day,’ Veth said, helpfully. ‘Otherwise all your flesh will start to die off.’

  
  


‘Well at least now it’s got some company,’ Beau mused. ‘I mean, I’ve almost got the trifecta,’ she said. ‘Now I’ve just gotta piss off a werewolf.’

  
  


Jester looked aghast. ‘Don’t even joke about that, Beau!’ Her voice had a shrillness to it that only appeared when she was very, very upset.

  
  


‘Come on, Jes.’ Beau grinned. ‘Don’t you know how medicine works? If I’ve got three viruses in me fighting each other, then none of them can win.’ Jester gave an even more distressed sound, and Beau could see tears in her eyes.

  
  


‘Beau,’ Fjord gave an exasperated sort of sigh. ‘You’re upsetting Jester.’

  
  


‘What, I use humor as a coping mechanism,’ Beau grumbled. _She_ was the one that had been through hell, she was allowed to have a little morbidity about the whole situation. The alternative was wallowing in a hole of self-pity, which was just no fun for anyone.

  
  


‘ _Anyway_ ,’ Fjord continued, in a voice that did not allow for argument. ‘We were talking—’ Beau scoffed slightly. She was very much used to people trying to make decisions about her life without her input. ‘—When you get out of here, there’s no way you’re going to get a decent recovery staying in that shithole apartment.’

  
  


‘Hey, that shithole is my home.’ Beau was starting to get a little pissed. Sure, she lived in a shithole, but she was the only one allowed to call it that.

  
  


‘Oh, Beau!’ Jester said, excitedly. ‘You could totally stay with me! We can stay up late and have a slumber party. Or I guess…stay up ‘til the late afternoon because that’s when I sleep.’

  
  


‘I think the idea is that she _rest_.’ Fjord’s tone was that of a gentle rebuke, and Beau was very much appreciative. She loved Jester, she really did, but she knew that if she stayed with Jester, there would not be a lot of healing happening. At least not in the ways that counted.

  
  


‘I’ll just stay at the Cobalt Soul,’ Beau told them. ‘There are plenty of dorms, and that way there’s always a medical officer on hand if I need them.’ It was a logical argument. None of them could deny that. At least if she stayed at the dorms, she wouldn’t have a fucking babysitter. Beau loved Jester dearly, but if she stayed at Jester’s place (or Fjord’s place, or Caleb’s, or anyone else’s) then she would have someone hovering over her, checking up on her, never giving her a moment’s peace.

  
  


Later that day, Beau got another visitor. Everyone else – all of her friends – they had their lives to live. A heavily bandaged, but determined-looking Dairon hobbled in at around six o’clock. They looked far better than Beau would have expected, given the last time she had saw them, bleeding out on the hospital floor. ‘Nice to see you on your feet,’ Beau commented.

  
  


Dairon gave a harsh laugh. ‘That knife was no joke.’ She winced slightly, as she sat down in the chair next to Beau’s bed. ‘How are _you_ feeling?’

  
  


‘Tired,’ Beau admitted. ‘But grateful to still be here.’

  
  


Dairon nodded. ‘That, ah...that is a sentiment that we share. I must thank you for saving my life. I am told that you literally woke yourself from a coma to do it.’

  
  


That sounded way cooler than what Beau remembered; stumbling out of bed, collapsing to the ground, and just barely managing to get her shots off before passing the fuck out. Generously, she would have called it “almost smothering Dairon to death.”

  
  


‘Dairon, I’ve never had a good night’s sleep in my life, why the fuck would I start now?’ Now that they were talking about sleep, though… ‘Hey, that reminds me. Since apparently even hospitals are dangerous places now, is there a possibility that I could stay at the Soul? At least until I can breath again without getting shanked.’ She winced slightly, but Dairon was clearly not so sensitive to care that they had just been stabbed.

  
  


‘As an Expositor, you are entitled to individual quarters at the Reserve. Has no-one told you this?’

  
  


A wave of confused anger washed over Beau. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why the fuck have I been living in a shoebox, then?’

  
  


‘I assumed it was so that you could, ah…have nighttime entertainment.’ They paused, and saw that from the look on Beau’s face, that had probably been the wrong thing to say. ‘I will have Zeenoth outfit your quarters for you. Perhaps Mr. Fjord and Mr. Widogast would consent to bring your things over.’

  
  


Beau didn’t bother to mention that Jester was stronger than Fjord and Caleb put together, nor that her personal effects would probably not even take up the full back seat of Fjord’s shitty car. He wouldn’t even have to take out his diving gear.

  
  


When the hospital let her out two days later, she returned not to her shitty apartment, but to an admittedly, pretty fucking nice set of quarters within the Cobalt Soul building.

  
  


It wasn’t nearly as big as Jester’s place, or even Caleb’s cozy apartment in the Pentamarket, the majority of its floor-space taken up by bookshelves, but given that Beau had been living in a place where her landlord had told her never to open the door to a building inspector, because it was technically an illegal subdivision, this was paradise in comparison.

  
  


The bed was a double, and had some pretty nice sheets on it, too. There was a small desk, and a table with two chairs, and even a couch (albeit one that would not seat more than two comfortably).

  
  


There was a small wet room, with the full-sized, shared bathroom down the other end of the hall. The only thing it was missing was a kitchen, which was admittedly no huge loss. Beau’s cooking skills were okay, but she kept such odd hours, that it was generally easier to eat out than to cook (no pun intended). At least she could eat at the Soul when the kitchens were open.

  
  


All of Beau’s things – half a dozen plastic tubs full of books and clothes, plus a shitty old guitar, a shitty old laptop, and a very smelly bag of workout gear – had been placed in the corner of the room. Zeenoth had told her that laundry was picked up on Grissen and Folsen, and that the cleaners came in on Da’leysen. That gave Beau a couple of days to unpack and tidy up a little before someone came in to judge her.

  
  


She made it halfway through one box, before exhaustion overtook her. Funnily enough, just because they had released her from hospital didn’t mean that she was all the way well again. Doctor Guiatao had told her that her red blood cells could take up to a couple of months to fully replenish, even with regular healing from the Cobalt Soul doctors.

  
  


Though she didn’t care to admit it to herself, things had changed irrevocably. Whatever the fuck was going on with this vamp den, with Obann, and with Yasha, and everyone else, Beau was committed. She had to figure it out. Dairon had not yet given her grief for all the risks she’d taken, all the secrets she’d kept, but that, Beau was sure, would come.

  
  


In the third box, she found all the info from her crazy-person pin-board. She was surprised that Fjord and Caleb hadn’t turned it in to Dairon. Then, she grabbed the notes that she had taken at the hospital, the memories that she dreamed of Obann and Yasha. In the nights since, there had been more memories, more muted, with less detail, but still enough that she had another page and a half of notes.

  
  


If Obann was controlling Yasha, was forcing her to do his bidding, forcing her to do things that she didn't want to do, then Beau was going to stop it. Stop him. It was the least she could do for the person that had saved her life.


	20. One bullet at a time

XX – One bullet at a time

  
  


It took a long time for things to start going back to normal. Or at least as normal as Beau expected them to. But perhaps that was just her impatience talking. Dairon (who was a filthy godsdamned hypocrite) was already back at their desk on the sixth floor, and yet refused to even consider allowing Beau to come back to work.

  
  


‘It’s been two fucking days,’ Beau said, angrily, fully aware that she was being more than a little petulant. It was a behavior that her father had always scolded her for, and yet that hadn’t ever stopped her from being petulant. Even the library was apparently off limits, as though reading a book would somehow be too strenuous for her.

  
  


‘Get some rest, Beauregard,' Dairon said, blithely, not even bothering to look up from their paperwork. Beau gave a scowling grumble that was not unlike ones that she used to give to her father. Dairon did not react. She had been on the receiving end of that look on multiple occasions. This was far from the first time that Beau had been petulant.

  
  


She returned to her room, thoroughly frustrated, only to be interrupted in her stewing by a knock on the door. Beau gritted her teeth, and tried not to swear. She opened the door, and Jester bounded in, either oblivious to the look of frustration on Beau's face, or seeing it, and choosing to ignore it.

  
  


'Hi Beau!' Jester said, somehow managing to make it seem like there were sparkles emanating from the mere sound of her voice. It was an annoyingly charming habit that Jester had. 'I just wanted to see how you were _doing_ ,' she said. She threw herself onto Beau's new bed, and stared at the ceiling. 'Wow, this room is so _small_.'

  
  


Jester didn't know, of course, that it was practically a mansion compared to where Beau had been living previously. Of course, her old apartment had the added bonus that people tended to not want to visit her. Not that Beau didn't like visitors. She just preferred them on her own terms. Jester, of course, lived in a _huge_ apartment. It helped that her mother was a famous courtesan, and her father was a feared crime boss.

  
  


'Shouldn't you be at home, asleep?' Beau asked, trying very hard not to sound like she didn't want Jester there.

  
  


'I know, I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay.' Jester sounded a little hurt, having clearly seen through Beau's pitiful attempts at sounding okay. 'Beau, it was _really_ scary when we found out you were in the hospital. We all thought you were going to die.' Even _Beau_ had been pretty sure she was going to die.

  
  


There was a long silence. Things had been mildly awkward between them for a while, but this was off the charts. 'Hey Beau,' Jester said, finally.

  
  


'Yeah?'

  
  


'You like...you slept with that angel, right?'

  
  


Of all the questions that Beau had possibly been expecting, that wasn't one of them. From the way people seemed to be looking at her, she had assumed that they'd at least figured that part out, but for Jester to straight out ask...Beau definitely hadn't been prepared.

  
  


'Yeah,' Beau said, finally.

  
  


'What was it like?' Beau couldn't help it. She laughed. She wasn't exactly sure what Jester had meant by the question, but she was pretty sure that a blow-by-blow description of the encounter was the answer. In fact, Beau had the sneaking suspicion that what Jester _really_ meant was “ _why_ did you sleep with the angel?” which was a much more complicated question.

  
  


'I mean...pretty, unattainable woman is pretty much my go-to,' Beau said. She wasn't sure if she had intended for the comment to hurt Jester, and she found that she wasn't sure she cared. 'I dunno, there's just something about her...she made me feel _good_ , you know?'

  
  


Jester clearly _didn't_ know, but that was hardly a mark against her. It was just something that was so hard to explain, so hard to quantify, especially with someone that Beau was pretty sure had never even _had_ sex. But that wasn't saying much. Beau was pretty sure that Fjord had had sex before, and she didn't think she could explain it to him, either.

  
  


It was just...sexual compatibility aside, Beau was pretty sure she'd never been with anyone that had been so attuned to her needs. It was a pretty depressing fact, given that Yasha had literally stabbed her.

  
  


Jester didn't stay long. It was well-past her normal bedtime, and they were both clearly running out of things to say. 'I'll see you later, okay Beau?' Jester said, even as Beau not-so-subtly tried to get her out of the room.

  
  


Was this what living here meant? That people would come up and see her whenever they wanted, without any regard for what she might be doing?

  
  


Beau had an idea for a solution to that. She went to her dresser, and found an odd sock.

  
  


Half an hour later, there was a knock on the door. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Beau muttered to herself.

  
  


It was Caduceus.

  
  


‘Caduceus, there’s a sock on my doorknob,’ Beau said, pointedly. Caduceus seemed very confused until Beau physically pointed out the sock to him.

  
  


‘Oh,’ he said. ‘So there is.’ There was a long pause. ‘You know, they only do laundry on Grissen and Folsen.’

  
  


‘I—’ Beau grimaced. ‘No, I know. When there’s a sock on the doorknob, it usually means that someone is very busy with…with _another person_ inside the room.’ She tried to make it sound as obvious as possible, but that wasn’t always the easiest sell with Caduceus.

  
  


He looked past her, into the room. ‘Is she gone now?’

  
  


Beau sighed. ‘Yes, Caduceus, she’s gone,’ she said, in a very tired voice. Maybe she would just have to get a “Do Not Disturb” sign. ‘What do you need?’

  
  


‘Oh!’ He seemed surprised, like he had forgotten that he had come there for a reason. ‘We have some tests to do, whenever you’re ready for them.’

  
  


Beau had maybe sort of expected that Jester would be doing the tests, but it did make sense. She was almost on a normal person’s schedule, now, sleeping when it was dark, and doing the work that she was allowed to do (that is, none at all) during normal working hours. That meant any testing was under the purview of the daytime medical officer, which was Caduceus. ‘Yeah, I’ve got time,’ she said. The only other option was lying on her bed wallowing in self-pity.

  
  


Down in the medical office, Caduceus had clearly been halfway through re-arranging the patient files so that they didn't spell out rude words. An all-too-common parting end-of-shift gift from Jester. Beau sat on the edge of one of the cots while Caduceus did his thing, drawing blood, and swabbing saliva, and taking all other kinds of looks and samples.

  
  


‘Your red blood cell count is still a little low,’ he told her, finally. ‘But the scars are healing nicely. Looks like the other viral things are being pushed back again as well.’

  
  


‘So tell me, Doc. Will I ever play the piano again?’

  
  


He considered the question, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know why you couldn’t. All of your fingers seem to be working well enough. Have you had any issues with range of motion?’

  
  


Beau was starting to suspect that he was doing this on purpose. At the very least, he was certainly more perceptive than he let on. ‘My range of motion is fine.’ She held out her hand, and wiggled her fingers. That was going to come in handy, soon enough. ‘Is that everything?’

  
  


‘Sure,’ Caduceus said. ‘Everything physical, at least.’ He gave a genial smile. ‘How’s your mental state?’

  
  


Beau shrugged, which was as close to the truth as she could have given. ‘I mean, considering I got torn apart by a bunch of demon vampires, I think I’m doing okay.’ The trouble with “okay” was that even the baseline was...well, “okay” for Beau was a little different to “okay” for other people.

  
  


‘They’re worried about you, you know.’ Beau didn’t bother asking who “they” was. It could have been any one of her friends. It could have been Dairon. Hells, if it had happened to anyone else, Beau would have been worried about them, too. She didn’t know why she _did_ feel so…okay about the whole thing. Like...not great, but not awful either. The things that she did feel shitty about had nothing to do with almost dying.

  
  


Maybe it was because even though a bunch of crazy evils had tried to kill her, one of them had clearly wanted to help her. Beau had no doubt about the fact that she would have been dead if Yasha hadn’t intervened, and the fact that she’d been maybe sort of having dreams of Yasha’s life absolutely didn’t hurt. It was weird. The more she had the dreams, the more connected she felt to this fallen angel. This super-hot fallen angel.

  
  


It was late afternoon, but Beau did not feel like hanging around the Soul. She had spent the last two four days confined to it, and was already going stir-crazy. That was the downside of no longer having to live in a cockroach-infested shoe-box.

  
  


‘I’m going for a walk,’ she told the poor trainee that was attending the front desk. ‘If you’re about to do what I think you’re about to do, remember that I’m much more likely to punch you than Dairon is, so please don’t pick up that phone so she can send someone to follow me. I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.’ The trainee gulped, and pulled their hand back from the phone. Beau was sure that the moment she was out of sight, they would pick it up again, but at least this way, she would have a bit of time to get away.

  
  


Dairon wasn’t her mother. Not that her mother would have given enough of a shit to send someone to follow her. Her father would have, but that was about control, more than it was about him actually caring.

  
  


The dusk air was a welcome sensation against her skin. Once or twice, she had gone to the roof of the Cobalt Soul building, just to get away from it all, but that was nothing to the simple pleasure of being able to set foot outside.

  
  


She walked around the block a few times, before making the reasonably short trek to Rinaldo’s. She had absolutely no desire to go to one of the vamp dens, not least of all because the last time she had gone to one, she’d ended up in a coma.

  
  


What she _really_ wanted to do was figure out whether or not Yasha was still alive, or if Obann had killed her. That was a problem that was going to be difficult to solve. Beau was pretty sure if she went to Dairon and said, 'Hey, I want to go and rescue the angel that I almost got myself killed fucking” then it wasn't going to end well. Weirdly, Beau was pretty sure that none of her friends would be interested in helping, either.

  
  


It was like...it was like she was at the edge of a canyon, and all of her friends were on the other side, but Beau no longer had any way of reaching them. She wasn't even sure _when_ she'd gotten to that side of the canyon, but figured it had probably been about the time she'd first looked into those green and purple eyes. Or maybe it had happened long before that. They had all always been a little more well-adjusted than her, after all.

  
  


In her head, they were just standing on that cliff's edge, whispering among themselves, but making no effort to try and reach her, and every time she tried to jump across, that cliff just got further and further away.

  
  


The tacos were not nearly as satisfying as usual. Still, the overwhelming rush of freedom that she had felt from merely being outside was enough to make Beau feel a little less...flat.

  
  


Not having anywhere else to go, Beau returned to the Cobalt Soul. On the way, a gentle sort of rain started to fall, and Beau made no effort to dodge it, or find shelter.

  
  


At the entrance to the Soul, Beau found the security guard, Bryce, talking with the acolyte at the desk. Bryce looked...disheartened to see her. Beau had always gotten on reasonably well with Bryce. They were always nice enough to her when they met in the hallways.

  
  


'Hey, Bryce, everything alright?'

  
  


'Ah, yes.' Bryce did not sound convinced. They looked back towards the security offices. There was a faint voice that sounded like it was yelling. A faint, but strangely familiar voice.

  
  


Beau started walking towards the offices. Bryce put a hand up. 'I would not go there if I was you,' they said, and Beau felt a brief flash of annoyance. She might have been on sick leave, but she was still an Expositor. They couldn't ban her from walking around the building. Bryce, Beau knew, was one of the good ones. They didn't stop her as she moved closer, but they had very clearly been given orders not to let her in. The voice was yelling again, still far enough away that Beau couldn't quite make out the words.

  
  


The voice, though...Beau couldn't place where she'd heard the voice before. Then, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, it hit her. She was lying in a bathtub, bleeding to death. ' _If you don't kill her, he's going to hurt you_ ,' the voice said. Beau pushed past Bryce, and charged into the security offices. It didn't take her long to find the cell where a haggard-looking, bright purple tiefling was grabbing the bars, calling out. '-have to call one of them down eventually!' he was shouting, stopping just as he saw the door open.

  
  


Molly's face split into a wide grin when he saw Beau standing before him. 'Finally,' he said. 'Someone in this place that might actually be able to help.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beau is Not Okay, and doesn't really realise it.


	21. What's your rush now

XXI – What's your rush now

Molly looked...well, he looked like hell. The first time Beau had seen the tiefling, his skin had been a nice, uniform purple, his eyes shiny and red. The skin was as bright as ever, but it was punctuated by still-healing bruises, and he looked as though he'd lost a decent amount of weight. His cheekbones were well-defined, and even if Beau did not even come close to swinging that way, she could tell that he would have been considered attractive.

  
  


He was still grinning as she stared at him, his fangs poking out above a split lip. Beau felt Bryce at her shoulder. 'Did Dairon tell you to not let me see him?'

  
  


There was a long pause. 'Yes,' they said, finally, and they at the very least had the good grace to look abashed about it. Typical. People always seemed to think they had Beau's best interests at heart.

  
  


'Have you been feeding him?'

  
  


'Yes,' Bryce said, at the same time Molly said:

  
  


'No.'

  
  


Bryce was unfazed. They had always been pretty good at rolling with the punches when it came to things like this. 'He's been getting meals. No blood.' Well no wonder he looked haggard. But that, at least, Beau could understand the reasoning for. A vampire wouldn't die if they didn't get blood. They just wouldn't be able to use their crazy vampire powers to break out of Cobalt Soul prison cells. A vampire could live for years on human food alone, but they didn't like to. It was like going without sex. Not fun, but certainly possible.

  
  


'I'm going to talk to him,' Beau said, and she wasn't going to take no for an answer. Bryce hesitated. 'Let me put it this way, who are you more scared of, me or Dairon?' The hesitation continued. Okay, bad example. Dairon was pretty scary. Beau would absolutely be more scared of Dairon. 'I'll tell them I punched you, or something.' Not particularly believable. The only person that Beau punched was Fjord, whenever they had a sparring session. She was generally pretty good at not beating up on her colleagues. 'Come on, Bryce. Ten minutes. Cameras on. I'll take the heat. I'm going fucking stir-crazy up there, I need something to do. I might even get somewhere.'

  
  


Finally, Bryce relented. They took a step back, nodding. Apparently this was happening right then and there. Oh well. Dairon was going to find out eventually. Beau turned back to the tiefling, who was still grinning, clearly having enjoyed Beau grovel to get even an inch of latitude.

  
  


'What happened?' Beau asked. 'Where's Yasha?'

  
  


Molly's grin turned quickly to a grimace. 'Well, you know how she suddenly turned into a stranger right before she plunged a knife into your gut?' Beau wondered how Molly knew that. She supposed Yasha must have told him. Interesting.

  
  


'Yeah, that sounds pretty familiar,' she said, dryly. Behind her, Bryce made a very soft noise. Beau was pretty sure they didn't know the exact details of what had happened to her. Now that Molly had said it in front of the cameras, Dairon would know soon.

  
  


'Well, every now and then, Obann sort of just...takes over her mind. If he thinks she's being insubordinate, or disrespectful, or anything like that.' Beau felt a surge of anger rise in her chest. Not at the fact that she had been stabbed, but at the fact that Yasha was being mind-controlled. Strangely enough, things where people had decisions, had autonomy taken out of their hands was something of a hot-button issue for Beau. 'Anyway, when he found out that Yasha had saved a human to keep in her bathtub as a pet, because she was falling in love, he decided to make that control a little more permanent.'

  
  


Of all the fucked up things about that sentence, there was one part that stuck in Beau's head, and she hated herself for it. 'What do you mean, falling in love?'

  
  


Molly's face wrinkled. 'Oh, I don't know if it's love the way you humans would define it. Maybe “infatuation is a better word. But our girl Yasha's always been a bit of a romantic.'

  
  


'Oh?'

  
  


'For sure. Can't go past a flower shop without buying their whole stock. Always reading those romance novels that you can get for five copper at the newsagent. Going to a sex bar, and railing a human that she can't get out of her head.' Bryce cleared their throat again. _Did fucking_ everyone _know?_ 'Anyway, that's why I turned myself in. I want to kill Obann, and save Yasha. But all your people seem to want to do is keep asking me questions that I've already given them the answer to.' It made sense, in a macabre sort of way. As much as Beau didn't want to admit it, the Cobalt Soul couldn't give two shits about Yasha. They wanted to make sure they had as much intel as possible before planning an assault on a vamp den. Especially the vamp den of someone like Obann, who, from what Beau could tell, was a decent cut about any other vampire she'd faced before.

  
  


She couldn't fault them for being cautious. But, there was logic, and then there was the Right Thing to Do, and in this case...well, fuck logic. Yasha had saved Beau's life. The least she could do was return the favor.

  
  


'Tell me about his defenses.' Molly thought on the matter for a moment.

  
  


'I think he'd probably be at his apartment. It's a fancy fucking thing in the Tri-Spires, way nicer than my place or Yasha's place. There's building security, but they're all vampires. If he's there, then he'll have Yasha with him. If he thinks there's danger – which he always does – he'll probably have the Hand and the Inevitable End with him.'

  
  


Beau frowned. 'The Inevitable End – is she the one that comes up through the floor?' Molly raised both of his eyebrows.

  
  


'She is,' he said. 'Can I assume that you've already made her acquaintance?'

  
  


'Well she's certainly been acquainted with a bunch of bullets,' Beau said, blithely, and Molly immediately perked up.

  
  


'She's dead?' he asked, and Beau nodded. 'Well that's wonderful. Now there are only three super-powerful vampires to deal with.'

  
  


'Two, if we can find a way to break his hold on Yasha.' Beau was talking to herself, more than to Molly. She wasn't entirely sure who the “we” she was talking about was, but she was pretty sure it wasn't going to be the Soul. There was no fucking way that Dairon would sign off on a mission like this. No fucking way that anyone else would go along with her on something so dangerous. Beau wasn't even sure why _she_ was going along with something so dangerous. 'The Hand.' Beau realized, suddenly, that she hadn't heard of the Hand. ''s that a person? Another vampire?'

  
  


Molly paled slightly. 'Ooh yeah, he's a mean fucker, the Laughing Hand.' Beau opened her mouth to ask, and before she could, Molly had answered her question. 'They call him that 'cos he's covered in scars that look like grinning mouths.' Charming. 'That, and the fact that the thing that makes him happiest in the world is draining people of their blood.'

  
  


There was a beat of silence. 'Great,' Beau said, finally.

  
  


'You know, if you let me out of here, I can help you get in,' Molly told her. 'I did come here voluntarily, after all. As far as your friends are aware, the only crime I've committed is the crime of being a very charming, pain-in-the-ass vampire.' Beau wasn't sure about either of those things. She hadn't exactly exchanged enough words with him to decide one way or the other. But there was something in the back of her head. That memory of being in the bathtub...

  
  


'Did you tell Yasha to kill me?' Beau asked. Molly stared at her.

  
  


'Yes,' he said, finally. 'No offense, I'm sure you're a wonderful person—' From the sarcastic tone in his voice, he thought anything but, '—but if it was a choice between saving your life and saving Yasha's life, then I absolutely would have let you die.'

  
  


Strangely, the fact that he was so honest with her even if he knew she wouldn't like the answer made Beau more inclined to trust him. Especially given that he did not look like someone that frequently dealt in honesty. In fact, he looked like the sort of person that would try selling Beau her own organs if he thought she would buy it.

  
  


Beau took a step back. 'Right,' she said. 'I'm...I'm going to talk to my boss. See if I can convince her that your intel is good, and that we should take out this son-of-a-bitch immediately.' Molly opened his mouth. 'I can't make any promises.' He closed it.

  
  


  
  


Beau left the security offices, Bryce on her tail. 'Can we...I dunno, there are blood banks, right? Give him a little something, just for co-operating?'

  
  


'I think that would be well beyond both of our purview,' Bryce said, lightly. Beau grimaced. Yeah, that was probably true. And if she was going to play a trump card, she didn't want to use it on getting this guy fed, she wanted to use it on getting this mission authorized. Not that Beau had any particularly strong cards left to play. She wasn't sure the “pity” card was going to help her too much.

  
  


Beau went directly to Dairon's office. If she was going to do this, she wasn't going to beat around the bush. Judging by the way that she was immediately ushered in there, Dairon had been expecting her.

  
  


'You need to stop terrorizing the acolytes,' they said, fingers steepled beneath their chin. Beau was very close to making a sharp retort about hypocrisy, but decided against it. After all, she actually needed Dairon to be in a good mood. 'And you need to not manipulate Bryce into doing things that they have been explicitly ordered not to do.' _How the fuck..._

  
  


Beau looked over to the monitors on Dairon's desk, where she knew there was footage from all the security cameras in the building. 'You saw that, huh?'

  
  


'It was very enlightening.' Dairon sounded more amused than upset. 'Somehow, you managed to get more from that tiefling in ten minutes than any of the rest of our interrogators did in three days.' Beau raised an eyebrow. They'd had him for three days, and done nothing. That was...well, it was interesting.

  
  


Beau opened her mouth, but before she could even ask the question she was going to ask, Dairon had answered it. 'No.' It was kind of insulting.

  
  


'You didn't even let me _start_ ,' Beau grumbled.

  
  


'You were going to ask me if you could take the tiefling and lead an assault on the residence of this “Obann” in an attempt to free the angel from his control. The answer is no.' Beau wasn't sure if it was her imagination or not, but Dairon looked somewhat troubled. 'It has become increasingly difficult for me to make excuses for your activities with the High Curator. While I cannot necessarily say that I approve...' She grimaced. 'Beauregard, you came very, very close to death recently, and I know for certain that there are several people within this building that would not forgive me if you were to go off on an ill-advised rescue mission without approval. If you did so, I would have no choice but to discipline you accordingly.'

  
  


It was a much shorter meeting than Beau had anticipated. She had expected to be shot down, of course, but she hadn't thought that it would be so...well, circumspect. It was interesting, though. Dairon wasn't the sort of person to mince words. They said exactly what they meant, and not a syllable more. There was something about those last few sentences that had sounded a lot like plausible deniability.

  
  


Or maybe that was just what Beau had wanted to hear.

  
  


Either way, it didn't really matter. Her mind was made up.

  
  


She was going to go and rescue Yasha, and she wasn't going to let something as petty as a direct order stop her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the endgame now...


	22. Everyone will have...

XXII – Everyone will have...

The first thing that Beau did was find Caleb. Of all the people she knew...well, she wasn't sure if she trusted Caleb more than she did the rest of them, but he, at least, she thought would understand her reasons for doing what she was. Fjord was too much of a goody-two shoes, and Veth was too much of a wild-card. Caleb was the perfect level of “shifty but trustworthy.”

  
  


After all, he had done his whole “defect from the Soltryce Academy” thing (something that most other members of the Cobalt Soul knew nothing about). He was well versed on keeping things on the down-low.

  
  


She found Caleb, to nobody's surprise, in the library. He was hidden away in a back corner, reading a book about transmuting living beings. That was a horrifying thing that Beau would gladly unpack another time. Caleb did not look up until Beau sat down in the chair next to him, arms folded over the back of the chair. Finally, when he realized he could ignore her no longer, he closed the book.

  
  


'Is there something I can help you with, Beauregard?' he asked.

  
  


'I need your help,' Beau said. There was no point beating around the bush about it.

  
  


Caleb stared at her. 'Is this something to do with the tiefling gentleman in the cells downstairs?' he asked. Beau frowned. She hated how annoyingly perceptive he was. Thankfully not as annoyingly perceptive as Caduceus, who had the frustrating habit of being able to pick up on things that Beau hadn't even admitted to herself, let alone spoken out loud.

  
  


'He's the only one that knows anything about Obann,' Beau explained. She didn't like this. She didn't like this at all. But what choice did she have? 'He's no help to me in those cells.'

  
  


'You want to break him out,' Caleb said. It wasn't a question. 'Do you want me to blow the door off?' That would have made things so much easier, it really would have. Well, what would have been _easiest_ , was if Beau could put together a team, could bring _all_ her friends along to help. But that wasn't going to happen. The last thing she wanted to do was to put them in danger for what was essentially Beau's personal interests. If it was any other vampire, there...if it was Molly there, she wouldn't have given a shit.

  
  


Maybe that made her selfish. It definitely made her kind of a shitty person, but...well, she could live with that.

  
  


'No.' Beau shook her head, before she could succumb to the temptation. 'I can break him out. I just...I need a distraction. Like what's that one that you and Veth did that one time? New Books?'

  
  


'Modern literature,' Caleb said. He sounded mildly amused. 'You want me to shoot you in the chest?'

  
  


'I just need you to get Bryce away so I can pick a lock,' Beau told him. 'As to how you're gonna do that, well...be creative.'

  
  


Caleb thought on that for a few moments. 'Alright, he said. In fifteen minutes, be in the lobby waiting for my signal,' he said. He seemed to have made a decision on the matter very quickly. Beau wasn't sure whether or not she should be worried about that. Probably yes, but honestly, at the moment, she didn't have time to be worried.

  
  


'What's the signal?'

  
  


Caleb gave a smile that could have been described as guileful. 'You will know it when you see it,' he said.

  
  


With those somewhat ominous words in mind, Beau went to the weapons locker. She definitely wasn't allowed to be here, especially not while she was on administrative leave. There were pretty strict rules about when weapons were allowed to be checked out, and Beau was pretty sure the rules weren't exactly vague about unsanctioned covert operations to rescue vampires.

  
  


It was a good thing, then, that Beau had a lot of experience at stealing things she really shouldn't have. She was saved the trouble of having to think of an excuse to get Veth out of there, when the halfling was already on her way out. 'Sorry Beau, can't stop to talk. Caleb said he needs my help.'

  
  


Beau raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. 'Sure,' she said. 'I'll come talk to you later then?' Veth had already left her earshot.

  
  


Well, that was easy.

  
  


Beau had learned the codes to the weapons locker her first week on the job, and every time they changed them, it hadn't taken her long to figure them out. There was, surprisingly, far less security at the Cobalt Soul than there was at most wineries. The Cobalt Soul wasn't trying to protect trade secrets.

  
  


Guns, stake guns, a couple of other bits and pieces. Beau didn't spend a whole amount of time looking for anything specific. Not if she wanted to be downstairs for when Caleb caused his big distraction. Her bag was looking very lumpy, so if anyone stopped her, she wouldn't be able to hide it very well. She grabbed a few miscellaneous things from the desk to put on top, just in case, and then made her way back downstairs.

  
  


It had been twelve minutes since she'd had the conversation with Caleb, but it would look pretty fucking suspicious if she was just hanging around down there. So Beau took a gamble, and went to find Bryce.

  
  


'You can't talk to him again,' Bryce said, before Beau could even say a thing. 'I've already gotten in trouble for letting it happen the first time. Beau rolled her eyes. Of course it didn't seem to matter that she'd gotten more out of him than anyone else.

  
  


Oh well. It would hardly matter in a moment. Just as Beau was starting to wonder what the signal was, she heard the sound of a not too distant explosion. Something that sounded vaguely like it was coming from one of the labs. Bryce's eyes widened. 'Did you see anything?' they demanded. Beau shook her head, but before she could say anything, Bryce had already run off.

  
  


There was another guard there, one who looked very confused, and unsure what to do. Beau was pretty sure his name was Merpal, and despite being told that she wasn't interested several dozen times, he continued to flirt with Beau every time he saw her.

  
  


'Hey Merpal,' Beau said, and Merpal gave a hopeful sort of dopey grin. 'Sorry.' And she punched him.

  
  


Things moved fast after that. Beau didn't wait around to see what would happen. She ran to the cell where Molly was being held, and picked the lock. It took a few seconds longer than she would have liked, given how rusty she was, but eventually the barred door swung open to an intrigued looking Mollymauk.

  
  


'Put this on.' Beau threw him a dark cloak that she had taken from the weapons office. Molly caught it, but made no move to put it on.

  
  


Molly stared at her. 'What are you doing?'

  
  


Beau was pretty sure it was obvious. 'I'm breaking you out,' she said. 'Are you coming, or not?'

  
  


Molly waited about half a second before throwing the cloak on. 'Why?' he demanded, as they left the security office.

  
  


'Why do you think?' Beau asked. She didn't waste time explaining. Explanations could wait. Right now, the important thing was getting the fuck out of there before Dairon caught them and murdered Beau. Chances were she would anyway, given that Beau had...well, knocked out a security guard, and potentially facilitated Veth and Caleb blowing up the building. Regardless of whether Dairon had given implicit permission, Beau didn't see a way out of that where she didn't get fired.

  
  


It hardly mattered any more. The Cobalt Soul was no longer a priority. Not that they hadn't given her more than she ever deserved. Not that Dairon hadn't literally pulled her from darkness, and given her purpose...but this was about more than hunting down dark creatures.

  
  


This was about saving someone. If the Soul wasn't going to let her do it, then she had no choice. Even if it meant her getting disavowed, and kicked back out onto the street. Even if it meant getting arrested for giving Merpal a black eye and a concussion. That one, she did feel bad about. Merpal might have been an idiot, but he mostly meant well.

Shit, was that how supervillains tried to justify things? Mental note, Beau, do not let yourself turn into a supervillain.

  
  


They ran.

  
  


Beau had to force herself to slow down enough so that Molly could keep up, and they had gone six blocks before Beau could let herself believe that they weren't being followed. She'd taken a few sneaky shortcuts, down alleyways that she knew had minimal security cameras that could be used to track them later.

  
  


They had a bag of weapons, a smattering of coin, and not a whole lot else. Beau wasn't stupid enough to go back to her old apartment, and she was pretty sure that Mollymauk didn't have a place to go. At least not one that Obann wouldn't be aware of.

  
  


They were quite literally out in the cold.

  
  


The best thing Beau could think of was a seedy motel, but not so seedy that it would be the first place people looked. Beau knew of a few options, some of which she'd definitely had ill-advised liaisons at. The sort of place that rented rooms by the hour.

  
  


They needed time to regroup, and to plan. As much as Beau hated to say it, whatever attack they were going to plan would need Molly at full strength, which meant blood.

  
  


'Copper for your thoughts?' Molly asked. It was the first thing he'd said since they'd left the Soul, and he had apparently spent the last three minutes simply staring at Beau while the gears turned inside her head.

  
  


'Just trying to think of a place to go,' she said, and his eyebrows shot up to near where his horns started.

  
  


'You planned an escape and didn't bother thinking about where to go?' He scoffed. 'Amateur move.'

  
  


'You know, I can take you right back there,' Beau said, and she was definitely tempted. She didn't particularly _want_ to work with this asshole after all.

  
  


'But you won't,' Molly said. He locked his bright red eyes onto Beau's. 'You want to save Yasha as much as I do.' He was right, so Beau didn't bother dignifying it with a response. She wasn't even sure _why_ she cared so much...There was just...just... _something_ about Yasha.

  
  


Beau took a deep breath. 'Alright,' she said. 'I think I know a place.' Without stopping any further, she took him to a small, reasonably shady motel. She'd been there once before, right after she'd left her vocational training at the Soul. Right before she'd started living on the street. It was cheap enough, and out of the way enough that they hopefully would not be found. Beau took her hair out of its bun, and adjusted her clothes a bit, so that hopefully the guy at the front desk (definitely not a fancy enough place to call him a concierge) would think that they were there for...ew. _That_.

  
  


'Usually when woman try to seduce me, they take me somewhere a little nice,' Molly commented, when the door clicked shut, and Beau had to stop herself from vomiting.

  
  


'Molly, you are a...let me put it this way. I've fucked your friend Yasha on multiple occasions. Even if I did swing even remotely in your direction, do you really think you could compete with that?'

  
  


To her surprise, Molly grinned. 'Point taken,' he said. 'She is a treasure.' He gave a sort of sigh, and collapsed onto the bed. He didn't look great. Definitely not in the sort of condition where he could be back-up in the vampire hunt they were about to go on. But, there was an easy way to fix that.

  
  


'You stay here,' Beau told him. 'I'm gonna go find you something to drink.'

  
  


Molly didn't particularly look like he was the sort of person that followed orders, but in this case, he seemed remarkably compliant. He had clearly come to the same conclusion as Beau had, that neither of them could save Yasha on their own. They were apparently a lot closer than Beau had realized.

  
  


An hour later, Beau returned with a quart of O-positive, and a very large pizza, plus a few other ancillary items. Molly wrinkled his nose slightly. 'You know, I'm usually more a fan of the negative,' he told her, and Beau made a move as though to pour the bag down the sink. 'Alright, alright!' he said quickly, putting his hands up. 'I was joking.' Beau tossed him the bag, and he drank the whole thing in under a minute. He wiped the blood from his lips, and gave a satisfied sort of sigh. 'Wonderful. That's pretty good blood. Why the fuck does a vampire hunter know where to get black market plasma?'

  
  


Beau had thought it was pretty obvious. After all, she was pretty sure that Molly knew where Beau had been meeting up with Yasha. She did know a decent number of vampires, and the easiest way to catch the shady ones was to know where the shady vampires would congregate. The sorts of shady vampires that sold black market blood. It wasn't even always for nefarious reasons. In fact, the people buying their blood on the black market were more likely to be the actual legitimate vampires, the ones that didn't necessarily have the paperwork to get it from a blood bank, but didn't want to ambush someone in an alleyway and take it by force. The people that fell through the cracks. Instead of saying any of this, though, Beau shrugged. 'I know some people,' she said.

  
  


After the blood, the asshole ate half her fucking pizza. Didn't seem to feel a shred of guilt. Beau had half a mind to kill him, but it would be stupid to do it now, after everything she'd done to get him out of there. No, she would just have to put up with him for a few more days, and then...well, then, she had no fucking idea.

  
  


The future was just a big, black ball of emptiness. Even if they _did_ manage to rescue Yasha, Beau had no idea what she would do. Get chucked into jail, probably. If there was one thing the Cobalt Soul took very seriously, it was corruption.

  
  


That, though...that was next week's problem. Right now, they had to figure out how they were going to rescue Yasha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wonder what that title's counting down to...


	23. ...his day...

XXIII – ...his day...

Beau wished she'd thought to bring a pen. Usually, she had one in her bag, but in the rush of trying to break a tiefling out of prison and not get tracked, she hadn't brought her bag with her. Even her phone was still sitting on the nightstand of her room at the Soul. The only thing apart from the weapons that she had brought was her wallet.

After giving up trying to use pizza crusts, and outright banning Molly from using the last drops of blood from his blood-bag, Beau went and got a pen from reception. It was a shitty ballpoint that had probably come in a pack of fifty from the dollar store, but it would have to do.

If there was one thing that hadn't quite come to light in their brief cell-door conversation, it was just how utterly obnoxious he was. For one thing, he kept cutting Beau off whenever she brought up an idea, telling her it wouldn't work, or that she was putting Yasha's life in danger. Beau stopped just short of punching him in the face. Now that Molly was blooded-up, it wasn't a fight Beau could win without drawing weapons, and he knew it. Oh well, once they'd done what they had come to do, she would never have to speak with him again.

Though, if she wanted to spend time with Yasha....That was the thing that Beau hadn't even really stopped to consider. What _was_ she going to do after this was over? She was pretty sure that riding off into the sunset with Yasha wasn't exactly in the cards, even if the angel's feelings for her _were_ anything beyond sexual. For one thing, Beau was almost certainly heading directly for a prison cell when she returned to the Soul. How was that for irony? The two vampires would be walking around free, and Beau would be the one locked up.

Ah, well. She had known that there would be consequences going into this.

'Have you finished yet?' Beau asked. Molly had been sitting in the corner of the room with an empty pizza box, and the pen (maybe she should have asked for paper as well) drawing a map. He had been there for almost twenty minutes, and Beau was starting to get the impression that he was taking long just to annoy her.

'You can't rush perfection,' he said, in that sort of voice that suggested he was _definitely_ taking a long time just to annoy her. Finally, though, he presented the grease-covered pizza box with a flourish.

The map was crudely drawn, but had an undeniable artistic charisma to it. Beau vaguely recalled the bright, multicolored coat Molly had been wearing the first time she'd seen him. He was clearly someone with an omnipresent flair, and his drawing was no different.

  
  


It looked like a penthouse apartment. Big bedroom, big bathroom, big living area, plus a very nice looking balcony. Definitely not likely to be accessible from outside if it was however many floors up.

  
  


'There's security on the building,' he told her. 'Plus once we're actually in there, Obann's no walkover.'

  
  


Beau stared. Whichever way she looked at it, it seemed like an impossible task. 'Well, if we can break Yasha's mind control, then that's one more person on our side, right?' Molly offered.

  
  


'Great, how do we do that?'

  
  


Molly was silent. 'Generally, there's only one thing I've seen that breaks the control, apart from magic.' Magic...well, magic was great, but the main problem with magic was that neither of them had any. Maybe if she'd brought Caleb or Fjord....but no. Then they'd be fired as well, and they needed their jobs far more than Beau did.

  
  


Beau waved her hand, encouraging him to continue. 'It'll sometimes break after an intense emotional moment,' he said. 'Like after she stabbed you, it broke then.' Oh. So that was why he was hesitating. 'Damn near broke _her_. So we might be able to pull her out by appealing to her sense of empathy.'

  
  


It was certainly a long shot, and Beau didn't particularly want to get stabbed again just to test it out. But what other choice did they have? With any luck, Molly's presence might at least cause some hesitation, if it came to fighting. There was clearly some kind of connection between them, the kind of connection that Beau had never had with anyone. An implicit trust, and a willingness to do anything for each other.

  
  


Beau twirled the pen in her fingers, and tried not to feel jealous. 'So where did you two meet? I get the impression that you've known her a while.' Of all the memories she had dreamed, she hadn't dreamed anything about Molly.

  
  


'Yeah, long enough,' Molly said. 'Well...a long time for me, but not as long for her. We think. She doesn't really remember all of it, but we think she's pretty old.'

  
  


'Oh.' Beau didn't mention the dreams that she'd had, of the place that hadn't existed in two hundred years.

  
  


'We met...I think it was about five years ago. She hadn't been with Obann all that long, and they found me in the ruins of a carnival, some fresh-faced vampire that had killed the only family he'd ever known in a fit of blood-lust.' Beau was surprised to realize that he was telling the truth. He sounded...well, he sounded remorseful. Remorse in vampires wasn't unheard of, but the sad thing was, most of them seemed to quickly learn that death was an inevitable consequence of being a vampire. The humanity very quickly went out the window. Not that Beau hadn't met friendly vampires. They were just rare.

  
  


'She's the most important person in my life,' Molly said, frankly. 'And I will do whatever it takes to save her. To get her out from under _him_.'

  
  


'Sounds like there's a story there, too,' Beau commented. Molly gave her a look.

  
  


'When someone looks after you, nurtures you, helps you grow...sometimes you don't figure it out until too late that they're bad for you, and by then, it's impossible to break away.' Beau could definitely relate to that. 'I just want to give her a chance at a normal life, whatever that looks like for a couple of asshole vampires.'

  
  


'She's not an asshole,' was the only thing that Beau could think to say to that.

  
  


'No,' Molly agreed. 'She isn't.' There was a long pause. 'How do you feel about being bait?'

  
  


Beau grimaced. It made sense. If Molly had been kicked to the curb because Yasha had let Beau live, then it wouldn't be too out of the ordinary for Obann to think that he might try and bring her back. But then, Beau barely knew Obann; the memories she'd had of him were clearly from a very fucking long time ago, and definitely not this plane of existence.

  
  


'So what,' she said. 'You waltz in, and say “hey Obann, guess what, I tracked down this piece of shit,” and then we what, we use our superior numbers and firepower to lay waste to them?' Molly didn't react to the sarcasm.

  
  


'I'm much better at square dancing,' he told her. 'But yeah, that was about the gist of it. Getting you in past security is the main thing, otherwise we can give up before we've even started.' He had a point. If they couldn't even get in the building, then there was no chance in any of the nine hells that they'd be able to rescue Yasha. Started from a disadvantageous position was better than not being able to start at all.

  
  


'Right,' Beau said. 'What's the best time to go in? Does Obann ever sleep?'

  
  


'Sure,' Molly said, in an offhand sort of voice, and Beau got the impression that he wasn't entirely sure. 'Middle of the day, like all vampires and college students.'

  
  


Hmm. Weirdly, Beau hadn't done too many missions in the middle of the day. Now that she thought about it, really, all of their “vampire-killing” ops should have been done in the middle of the day. Well, there was always a first. Hopefully this wasn't a first in other ways as well, like “first time dying” or “first time getting kidnapped by vampires.” Well, that one would actually be a second, so she was alright on that front.

  
  


'Not sure when you sleep though,' Molly continued, and Beau gave him a confused sort of look. Why did it matter when she slept?

  
  


'No offense,' he said, clearly not giving a shit whether he offended her or not. 'But you look like shit.' Beau was about to bite back a retort about the pot calling the kettle black, but then she reconsidered it. Really, she was mostly running on adrenaline. The sleep she'd had over the last few days was fitful at best, having been plagued with blood memories, and general sort of nightmares. It turned out that getting drained of blood and being left for dead wasn't exactly the best for your mental health.

  
  


She was still technically low on blood cells, and now, looking in the mirror, Beau could see that she looked none too put together. There were dark bags under her eyes, and bruises over her arms, and the muscles that she had worked so hard to build had atrophied to nothing.

  
  


Had she really let things get this far?

  
  


Had she really risked her job, her life, her entire livelihood to break a tiefling out of prison to plan a mission with very little chance of success? For a long time, Beau had walked that line between functional and disaster, and now it looked like she'd crossed it without even realizing. A disaster who probably wasn't in the best frame of mind for decision-making.

  
  


Maybe she should have thought of that before planning a suicide mission. Because that was what it was, really. For all they talked about doing it in the daytime, and using Beau as bait...there was a pretty fucking low chance that either of them was going to make it out alive. Molly at the very least, might get turned into some kind of thrall, but at best, Beau could probably hope for a quick death. At least quicker than it had been the last time Beau had been in Obann's presence.

  
  


_Snap out of it_ , Beau told herself, as she came to her senses. _This is no time to feel sorry for yourself._

  
  


It was getting late, and sleep definitely was not a bad idea. In fact, it was a pretty good idea. If she was going to do this as a wreck of a human being, then she would at least do it as a wreck of a human being with a full night's rest.

  
  


She wasn't entirely comfortable with falling asleep with no-one to watch her back against Molly but it wasn't as though she had much choice. He was either going to kill her, or he wasn't, and there wasn't a damn thing that Beau could do about it.

  
  


Thankfully, at least, there were two beds. Beau was pretty sure having to share a bed with the asshole would have been the last straw for her.

  
  


Even still, sleep did not come easily.

  
  


Beau tossed and turned for a couple of hours. Molly, the bastard, seemed to have fallen asleep almost immediately. It was well after midnight, though, before Beau finally managed to drop off, and when she did, it didn't last long.

  
  


It felt like no time had passed at all before she was being shaken awake by an urgent, purple hand. 'What the fuck, Molly,' Beau grumbled, rolling over and sitting up. He hadn't turned the light on.

  
  


'Sorry, unpleasant one,' Molly said, and Beau could have sworn he was smiling in the moonlight. The smile didn't quite reach his eyes, and it took Beau longer than she would have liked to realize why.

  
  


Molly wasn't alone.

  
  


Standing in the shadows behind him was a red-horned, red-tailed, red-winged demon, leering at a bleary Beau. Obann stepped out of the darkness. 'Oh, Molly. I will admit that you are not the most consistent of lackeys, but when you deliver, you do deliver.'

  
  


Well, shit. Beau's eyes shot to the door, already knowing that it was going to be a long shot. Yasha was standing there, face impassive and unrecognizing.

  
  


'You motherfucker,' Beau spat. She should have seen this coming. How the fuck hadn't she seen this coming? Of course, Molly would have thrown her under the bus to save Yasha. Hells, Beau would have done exactly the same thing to him, if she'd had the chance, but that was a moot point right about now.

  
  


Whichever way she looked at it, Beau was completely and utterly fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whooops.


	24. ...to die

XXIV - ...to die

Beau had barely pulled herself to a seated position when she was yanked to her feet by Molly. There was a look in his eyes that she couldn't quite interpret? It was weird. He hadn't exactly made a secret of his disdain for her, to this point. How the only reason he was working with her was so that he could save Yasha. This did seem like a much easier way to do it, and the only thing that they would be losing was Beau.

  
  


Once upon a time, when Beau was even more self-loathing than she was at present, she would have considered that an alright deal.

  
  


'What do you want me to do with the trash?' Molly asked, loudly, yanking at Beau's shoulder. She tried to muscle her way out of his grip, but for some reason, in her idiocy, she had gotten him blood. He was far too strong for her to break the grapple. 'Take it out?' He yanked Beau's head towards him, so that his face was just inches from her hair. Gross.

  
  


Obann seemed thoroughly amused by the situation. 'Well I'm a very big fan of giving people a chance to atone for their mistakes.' His voice sent a shiver down Beau's spine. There was something in his tone that had nothing to do with him being a murderous vampire demon, and everything to do with him being a creepy motherfucker.

  
  


'You two have had the pleasure,' Molly said. His hand brushed against Beau's neck. 'The Hand isn't here, he won't get jealous. Is it alright if I take a sip?'

  
  


Obann waved his hand dismissively. As though Molly taking Beau's blood was of little importance to him. Really, it probably was. He probably saw it as nothing more than Molly eating an apple, if the apple was about to get murdered. Super. Beau grabbed for his horns, but he pulled back like she was nothing more than a toddler trying to keep hold of their favorite stuffed animal.

  
  


Molly leaned in, and Beau was sure that if he'd had a heartbeat, she would have been able to feel it. His breath, at least, was warm, and strangely comforting. His teeth pierced the skin just below Beau's ear. She couldn't breath. Couldn't move. Was this one of his vampiric powers?

  
  


'The bag's under the bed,' he whispered, as he pulled away. He hadn't drunk very much. Enough, maybe, but not nearly as much as vampires usually took. 'Fuck him up.' “The bag's under the bed.” That could only mean the bag that she'd taken from the Soul. The bag that was filled with weapons. That crazy fucking bastard. Louder, Molly gave a disgusted snort. 'No substance at all.'

  
  


Before Beau could stop herself, she had given a sarcastic retort. One day, that would get her into trouble. 'Sorry, I guess someone's already drained me dry this month. Asshole.' Molly laughed as he kicked Beau to her knees. She landed heavily, and jarred pretty much everything. Everything was going to be really sort tomorrow, if she survived until tomorrow.

  
  


From her knees, Beau could see under the bed, but couldn't quite reach. Molly must have stashed the bag there while she slept. If this was the plan that he'd made on his own terms, it wasn't bad. It definitely put Beau on the back foot, but that was probably the idea. Because though neither of them mentioned it while they were planning, if Molly dragged Beau into Obann's penthouse apartment, that was relying on two of them to lie. Beau was a pretty good liar, but it was risky business. 'You're gonna have to try harder than that to keep me down.' He took the bait, and put his foot on her back, pushing her to the ground. Beau tried to make it look like she had lost balance, her arms flailing outwards. The handle of the bag was just out of reach.

  
  


_Fuck_.

  
  


Well, Beauregard, it's now or never. The voice in Beau's head sounded suspiciously like Dairon, teaching her a new way to cut off the flow of blood to someone's brain, or whatever. When all of this was over (not if, when) Beau was going to have to buy them a very nice dinner, and a very expensive bottle of wine to say I'm sorry, and also maybe a little bit thank-you.

  
  


Thank-you for believing in me. Sorry you were wrong.

  
  


She dove for the bag. Molly, to his credit, was playing his part well. He grabbed for the back of her shirt to pull her back, but by that point, Beau had already snatched the first thing on top of the bag.

  
  


When Molly threw Beau onto her back, she was already leveling the stake gun in Obann's directing. Bang. Bang. Stake guns didn't make even close to the same sound that a normal gun did, but the sentiment remained.

  
  


One stake hit Obann in the shoulder, and the other one pierced his wing. He should have been reeling in pain, should have been screaming in agony. Instead, he snarled. He seemed to appear in front of Beau without even moving. The stake gun, he crushed in the grip of his hand, and Beau, he reached down to rip her heart from her chest.

  
  


His hand never made it there. Molly had yanked him backwards. The tiefling was not even close to being as strong as Obann, but it was enough for Beau to scramble backwards, and go for the bag again.

  
  


'Yasha, kill her!' Obann snarled, reeling as Beau shot him two more times. This time, sharp cracks echoed in the tiny room. Enraged, Obann pulled the stakes from his body, but didn't seem to care too much about the bullets, even though they had mushroomed as they pierced his body, leaving wide wounds that gushed with vampiric blood. Before Beau could fire again, Yasha had grabbed her by the throat, and tossed her into the wall. A few things broke, some of them Beau's, and some of them not. Ribs were cracked and splintered, and based on the fact that it was suddenly very hard to breathe, one of them might have pierced a lung. Beau coughed, and nearly choked on the blood that came up. 'Yasha,' she murmured, but her voice could not pierce that veil of control.

  
  


'Yasha!' Molly yelled, and this one, Yasha did react to. She turned, and Beau turned, and they both saw Molly struggling to break free from Obann's grip. He couldn't. He could only stand there as Obann thrust his hand into Molly's chest, and twisted. The tiefling gave a disbelieving sort of laugh, and dark crimson blood splattered across his chin. 'Hey Obann,' he said. 'Fuck you.' He hocked up a glob of bloody saliva, and spat in Obann's face.

  
  


Beau didn't move. Couldn't move. She just watched as Molly fell to the ground, dead. She averted her gaze rather than watch his body turn to ash and dust. Obann had a determined smile on his face, and Beau knew beyond shadow of a doubt that she was next.

  
  


They were both distracted, however, by a sound. It sounded like...it sounded like a whimper. Beau looked to where Yasha was standing above her, ready to strike again. Under the shitty light of the motel room, she could just about see the tears streaming down Yasha's face. Could see the way her fists were clenched.

  
  


Yasha screamed. It was the most horrific sound that Beau had ever heard in her life. Dark, spectral wings burst from the angel's shoulders, and seemed to cause a shock-wave through the room. Beau fell to the ground, clutching at her head.

  
  


_She was six years old, and she was crying. Her arm was red from where her father had grabbed, it, pulling her inside. 'We don't associate with those people, Beauregard,' he hissed. 'Hanging around with riffraff from the Mud Fields is just what I would have expected from you. Why can't you just...do as you're told?' All Beau had wanted to do was play with someone her own age, she didn't know why her father was yelling about it so much. Couldn't stop the tears from streaming down her face._

  
  


_She was twelve years old, and she was shaking. Her father was telling her off for one thing or another. He told her off for so much that Beau sort of lost track a lot of the time. Either she wasn't studying the things he wanted her to study, or she was sneaking off to the kitchens to talk to the cooks, or she was just...being something that he didn't want her to be. She would never stop being something that he didn't want her to be._

  
  


_She was sixteen years old, and she was shivering. She had thought she was being sneaky,climbing out of her bedroom window late at night to meet Tori down at the Gemmed Hearth. It had started as drinks, and talks, and had eventually morphed to staying the night in one of the shitty rooms above the bar. She hadn't expected to get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by her irate father, screaming about how she was sullying the family name. Certainly hadn't expected to get thrown out into the cold._

  
  


_She was twenty-four years old, and she was...she was....half-dying in a shitty motel room, watching an angel fight a vampire._

  
  


They were just a few of the worst moments of her life, being played in her head, over and over again, like a slideshow. Beau could feel the blood dripping from her nose, and her ears and her mouth, far, far worse than it had when she had first looked at Yasha's photo.

  
  


The form before her now...Dark spectral wings, and dead black eyes, and bright white hair. She looked otherworldly, and not a single thing like the angels Beau had seen in books. Them, with their halos, and their soft white feathers...This was beyond even the first time that Beau had seen the wings, and seemed to have the full force of Yasha's wrath behind it. She roared, and dove towards Obann. Beau scrambled backwards out of the way. She would only get in the way.

  
  


While they both had weapons at their disposal, neither of them seemed to notice. Obann swiped with his claws, his wings, his tail, anything that might draw blood, whereas Yasha seemed to preferred her fists. Beau could definitely relate to that. Though her eyes were still half-filled with blood, she could have sworn that there was lightning emanating from each punch that Yasha landed. This was a fury, a rage beyond anything that Beau had ever seen before. Yasha's hands glowed with bright, white light, and an enormous sword appeared in her grip, the kind of sword that the angels in all the books seemed to be carrying.

  
  


She ran Obann through with it. He choked, and spluttered, and could not even begin to fight back as Yasha's hands went to his shoulders, to where his wings emerged, and began to pull. The scream was unearthly, otherworldly in the same way that the person ripping his wings from his body was otherworldly. Another shock-wave pulsed from the angel, and Beau felt the darkness press in on her, first slowly, and then all at once. The last thing she managed to see before she lose consciousness completely was Yasha pulling the sword free, and taking Obann's head off.

  
  


Things were dark for a little while. Beau thought she had a dream about being buried beneath the ground, about clawing her way to the surface, and the burning light.

  
  


Then, she woke up.

  
  


The room was empty, save for two piles of ash.

  
  


The first pile was very large, and, based on the expensive suit sitting on top of it, had been Obann. Beau had just barely seen that final blow, but hadn't watched the demon turn to dust. She knelt down, and rubbed some of it between her fingers. It was definitely vampire dust. Not quite the same consistency as some of the vampires she'd staked, but still very recognizably vampire.

  
  


The other pile was much smaller, and had clearly been disturbed. There were no clothes on this pile. From the smudges, and the way things had been moved, and the ashy footprints that led to the door, Beau was pretty sure that she could put together what had happened. Yasha had collected Molly's clothes, and as much of the ash as she could. Whether to do some kind of magic, or to give him a proper burial, Beau didn't know. Resurrection magic was...tenuous at best, and it didn't really work on vampires. But, for all Beau knew, there was some special angel magic that could do it.

  
  


Well.

  
  


That was it. Molly was dead, and Obann was dead, and Yasha was...gone. Beau was bleeding from just about everywhere that it was possible to bleed. She could feel her ribs pulling, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. She probably needed a doctor, but before any of that, there was something she needed to do.

  
  


She hobbled to the front desk, where a terrified looking clerk was huddling, trying his best not to be seen. 'Is it over?' he asked, in a whimpering sort of voice. The phone was in his hand, like he'd already called the police.

  
  


'Can I borrow that?' Beau asked. She didn't wait for an answer before she pulled it from his grip. The number she dialed was one that she had dialed many times before, but never with so much pain and regret.

  
  


Her voice shook as she spoke. 'This is Expositor Lionett,' she said. 'I need a clean-up crew.'

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ............


	25. Lost again

XXV – Lost Again

Yasha watched as Obann turned to dust, his headless body still stiff and upright. She tried not to feel too happy about it. She couldn't feel too happy about it, because Obann was dead, but...

But Molly was too.

The sword clattered to the ground. It was a sword that she didn't recognize, that she had never seen before in her life, and yet it felt so comfortable in her hands. Impaling Obann on its point and ripping off his wings and tearing off his head had felt...normal. Was this the life that she had forgotten?

That...that was a problem for later, now...now she needed to see Molly.

As she knew she would, Yasha found nothing more than a pile of ash where Molly had been standing. She had watched, helpless, as Obann thrust a hand into his chest, and tore out his heart. She had been screaming, begging, praying behind those shackles of Obann's domination, to no avail.

On top of the pile, there were some golden-colored chains and earrings, and clothes that Molly would never wear again. Yasha fell to her knees, and wept. She did not have the energy, did not have the strength to cry out, and it wasn't until she heard the moan from the corner of the room that she was pulled from her trance.

Beauregard was still lying against the wall – Yasha had a sudden, horrible memory of having thrown her against it – and she was covered in blood. Even from a distance, Yasha could hear her heart beating, but it was starting to slow.

Yasha put a hand to her chest, and healed. It didn't heal much – her magic was limited, compared to that of a true angel – but the heartbeat started to steady. For good measure, Yasha bit her wrist, and let a few drops of blood fall to Beauregard's already crimson-covered lips. If nothing else, it would keep her alive. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered, not taking her hand away from Beauregard's chest. 'But I have to take care of Molly.'

She went to the smaller ash pile, and folded up Molly's clothes into a messy pile. The ash, she scooped as much of it as she could into a plastic bag. She could not bring him back. She could not do anything about the fact that he had died to save her.

All she could do was mourn him.

* * *

The clean-up crew came, and Beau went back to the Soul. If she'd had a tail, it would be between her legs, but then, it wasn't as though she had anywhere else to go. She'd done what she had set out to do, and now...well, now she had to deal with the consequences.

It was after midnight, which meant that Jester had started her shift. She gave a horrified sort of gasp as Beau limped into the office (after having given a very long, very sincere apology to Bryce, who somehow didn't drag her into a cell, and was frankly, very nice about the whole thing, which made Beau feel even worse).

'Holy _shit_ Beau.' Jester ran to her side, and immediately put a hand to Beau's shoulders. The warmth of good old clerical healing spread through her, fixing the headache, and the cracked ribs, and the tiny little inconsequential hole in her lungs. Suddenly it became so much easier to breath, but nothing could be done about the solid weight on her chest, because that had nothing at all to do with a physical wound. 'You look like shit.'

Beau burst into laughter. She couldn't help herself. She grabbed a hold of Jester's shoulder, and was overcome by a gale that she could not stop. What a fucking day.

Looking in the mirror, Jester wasn't wrong. Blood had dripped from what looked like every hole on her head, and her clothes were torn, and...it was just an utter mess. She would have to take a very fucking long bath, but that would have to wait until she'd done all the other things she needed to do, the most important one of which was “talk to Dairon.”

Beau made her way upstairs to Dairon's office. The journey took her past the lab, which was sealed off with bright yellow “Caution” tape. Beau's stomach roiled slightly. She hoped that Caleb and Veth hadn't gotten into trouble.

Dairon didn't speak right away. They seemed perfectly content to finish off their paperwork before talking. When she did speak, though, Beau could scarcely have predicted the answer. 'Could you possibly have achieved your goals without blowing up the lab?'

Beau shrugged. 'I didn't give Caleb specifics. You know how much he likes to burn things.' Now that she was in Dairon's office, getting blood all over her chairs, it seemed pointless to pretend that it had been anything other than on purpose. Beau got the impression that Dairon would punish them all more if they tried to lie to her, even if Caleb had tried to play it off as an accident. 'Don't blame him, though. If you're going to blame anyone, blame me.'

  
  


Dairon said nothing. They steepled their fingers beneath their chin, and Beau could tell that they were still processing the evening's events, and probably hadn't decided on a suitable punishment. 'That was good work, taking out the demon,' she said, finally. 'I've sent a team out to the location you advised to find the last one, the Hand, you called him?'

  
  


'Yeah,' Beau said. She frowned. 'Honestly, I didn't really do anything. Y—The angel is the one who killed Obann.' Things probably would have gone exactly the same – maybe even better – if Beau hadn't been there. She was, as she had always been, superfluous.

  
  


Dairon passed a critical eye over Beau. They were always very good at picking up when she was berating herself for things she had very little control over. 'Go clean yourself up,' they said, finally. 'Get some rest. We can talk later, about...about what happens next.' About Beau's punishment, she meant. Weird that she would phrase it that way, given that Dairon was never one to beat around the bush.

  
  


Beau wanted to argue, but frankly, she was way too fucking tired. Way too covered in blood.

  
  


She trudged her way to her room, and had a long, hot bath. At this time of morning, there were no other Expositors around, let alone using the shared bathroom, so Beau spent a very, very long time soaking in the water.

  
  


Tomorrow...tomorrow, she would have to talk to her friends, and apologize, and figure out what the fuck she was going to do next.

  
  


The first part was a lot easier than the second.

  
  


Beau woke late, and went down to the dining hall. It was lunchtime, and lunch today was chicken salad. Beau ate four helpings of it, and by the time she was done, she was starting to feel a little more human. About ten seconds after she'd put her fork down, Fjord and Caduceus sat down opposite her.

  
  


'Oh uh...hey,' Beau said, feeling a rush of embarrassment wash over her. ''Sup?

  
  


'How are you feeling?' Caduceus asked, as Beau knew he would. 'Jester told me you were looking pretty banged up last night.'

  
  


'Nothing she couldn't heal,' Beau said. She rubbed at the fang marks on her neck, the only wound that still did remain. Strangely, she hadn't had any memories from Mollymauk. At least none that she could place. Maybe because he was dead, the connection had been severed. She thought there might have been something from Yasha, but in all honesty, Beau had slept so heavily that she didn't really remember the dreams.

  
  


'That tiefling,' Fjord started, and really, that was all he needed to say. Beau shrugged.

'He's dead.' She was surprised how much that fact bothered her. If not for him, then Yasha would still be under Obann's sway. But then, Yasha hadn't stuck around either. Beau should have known better than to think that she was somehow special, or important. She was just another piece of meat. 'Sorry if I've been....you know, distant over the last few weeks.'

'Well, you did sort of...' he trailed off. Yeah, she did sort of...fuck an angel, and maybe fall a little bit in love with an angel, and then get kidnapped by vampires, and then saved by the angel. It was...it was something. Probably going to take a while to even get her head around it.

'You know,' Caduceus said, sounding for all the world like he hadn't even really been paying attention to what they were saying (even though he very definitely was). 'I always find a nice cup of tea helps me clear my head. I've got a few you might like.'

After lunch, Beau went to the library. She didn't have anything specific she wanted to research, but she had a hunch that she might find at least Caleb there, and maybe Veth too.

They were both tucked away near the back, looking exactly like the sort of people that had faked a lab explosion as a distraction. While they had both clearly been healed, Caleb's coat was singed along the collar and lapel, and Veth's hair looked as though it had been inexpertly trimmed to get rid of some burnt bits.

They both looked up as Beau approached them.

'Oh, hey!' Veth looked pleasantly surprised. 'You're still alive.'

'Yeah,' Beau said. It was honestly kind of a surprise to her, too. She hadn't really expected to live through all of this, and she still wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that. Holy shit. Did she have a death wish? Oh man, that was...that was something that she did _not_ want to deal with. 'Thanks for your help. Hope you guys didn't get into too much trouble.'

'There was an accidental explosion,' Caleb said, in a deadpan sort of voice. 'Why would we possibly get into trouble for that?' Beau couldn't help but smile. She didn't deserve these people.

Out o the corner of her eye, Beau saw a blond-haired, elven man edging over in their direction. She suppressed a sigh.

'Hey Zeenoth,' she said, giving him a wave. Zeenoth gave an acknowledging nod, and leaned in towards Beau.

'You should know,' he said, in a low, and yet still very judgmental voice. 'That Dairon is upstairs with the High Curator this very moment, being blamed for your mistakes.'

Beau stared at him. She realized, suddenly, that he wasn't actually _trying_ to be judgmental. He was giving her the opportunity to do something. 'Thanks,' Beau said, giving him a nod. To Veth and Caleb, she said, 'I'll be back in a bit.' And then she ran for Dairon's office.

The heavy wooden door was shut, but not locked, and Beau didn't even bother knocking before she burst into it. Two faces turned to look at her. Oh, shit.

'Hey,' Beau said.

  
  


Beau had met High Curator Turray on a few occasions. He'd never been particularly nice to her, far more interested in brown-nosing to the Empire than actually making sure that the world was free of evil creatures.

  
  


'Why don't you come in and take a seat, Beauregard,' he said, speaking her name as though it was a piece of filth that he would rather not touch. Beau was very familiar with that tone of voice. 'I was just asking Expositor Dairon here why you have been continually allowed to run amok without oversight. A testament to her poor leadership skills as well as your own arrogance and disrespect.' Beau had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. If it'd been just her own career at stake, she would have done it, but she absolutely could not – would not – let Dairon take the fall for what she had done. She stood straight, ignoring the chair that Turray was gesturing to.

  
  


After all, it wasn't even close to the first time that Beau had been called arrogant and disrespectful. 'Dairon had nothing to do with my insubordination,' Beau told him, trying very hard to keep the scorn out of her voice. 'In fact, Dairon explicitly ordered me not to do the thing that I did. It's not their fault.'

  
  


'Then perhaps the question I _should_ be asking, is why a clearly insubordinate Expositor has been allowed to remain with the archive.'

  
  


'I'm not,' Beau said, before she had even realized it. When she _did_ realize what she'd said, it took another few moments for her to know that she had meant it. 'I am in the process of drafting my letter of resignation.'

  
  


For the first time, Turray looked mildly satisfied. Surprised, but satisfied. Dairon, on the other hand, looked as though she was about to blow a gasket. 'High Curator, I would be interested to know why it is that you were so insistent that this particular vampire den be left to their devices, especially given that we now have evidence as to the extent of their malfeasance. In _my_ opinion, in taking them down, Beauregard has done a great service to this city, and the fact that you were so unwilling is something that I will be bringing up with High Curator Fon the moment this meeting is over.'

  
  


What followed was perhaps one of the greatest moment's in Beau's life. The High Curator's face turned a shade of extra-bland porridge, and he began to stutter. Dairon gestured to the door, and the High Curator made a very hurried exit. It was kind of hilarious.

  
  


'I have wanted to do that for a very long time,' Dairon said. They were smiling. A perfectly arched eyebrow indicated to the chair that Turray had vacated. Beau sat down. 'You don't have to leave. I can deal with him. We may have to talk about your methods, but...you are an excellent Expositor, Beauregard. You are capable of finding out information that other Expositors could not even imagine. It would be a shame to lose you.'

  
  


Beau felt the sudden rush of discomfort that she always felt when she got too many compliments in a short space of time. Like Dairon was lying to make her feel better. The fact that Dairon would lie for many reasons, but never to make someone feel better, was a very small comfort.

  
  


There was a long pause between them, which Beau finally broke.

  
  


'I'm still leaving,' she said. 'I...Need some time, you know? Figure out where my head is at, and what I want to do with my life.'

  
  


She wasn't sure whether or not it was her imagination, but Dairon looked almost...disappointed. 'You are, of course, welcome to continue to use your quarters for the time being,' they said, finally. 'Until you find your feet.' There was an unspoken _Or if you change your mind_ in there somewhere. Beau appreciated it.

  
  


She considered the idea. It did make sense. After all, she had no money, no family to go and stay with, and no real direction or purpose...staying for a little bit (and maybe doing a little bit of consulting on the side) was probably the logical course of action.

  
  


There was a great, big, wide world out there, and Beau had no fucking idea what she was going to do in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey I am almost finished this story go to this post and tell me what you want to see next:
> 
> https://thefriendlymurderer.tumblr.com/post/628401005749567488/so-reckless-dark-desires-is-coming-up-on-its-final


	26. XXVI - Catch me heal me lift me back up to the sun

XXVI - Catch me heal me lift me back up to the sun  
  
  


The next few weeks were...well, they kind of just were. True to her word, Beau did do a little bit of consultation, helping Fjord, and Caleb and Veth out with whatever it was they were working on, and not a whole lot else. Ironically, now that she wasn't receiving orders, she was doing far better at following them. For one thing, she rarely left the Cobalt Soul building except to go and get food, and if she was honest, she was probably falling into a mild sort of depression.

  
  


The sort of depression that you got when you didn't know what the fuck you were doing in life, and you had given up on the one thing that you were good at because it was maybe a little bit bad for you. Or maybe the job wasn't the bad thing, and Beau was just kind of fucked up. Either way, it necessitated getting her head on straight before doing anything else.

  
  


One night in Cuersaar, not too far from Barren Eve, Beau found herself dragged out to dinner by her friends. They were unrelentingly cheery, and Beau appreciated it about as much as she disdained it. At the very least, it was a nice distraction from all the shit that was going on inside her head. She almost missed the memories, which faded after the last of Yasha's blood left her system. She was still dreaming of the angel, but they weren't dreams that she would ever share with the rest of the group.

  
  


They were supportive, of course. Caleb bought her a beer, and they got her favorite extra-spicy nachos for an appetizer, even though they made Fjord go red in the face and drink the entire carafe of water. They laughed, and they joked, and for a little while things felt nice. Things felt normal. Then, when she stopped for a moment to think about it, everything sort of came rushing back, and Beau felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness.

  
  


The Soul had shrinks that she could talk to, of course, but Beau wasn't even sure where to begin with how she would explain what was going on inside her head. “Hey Doc, since the age of sixteen, I've been using sex as a band-aid to cover up the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and loneliness that I feel as a person, and I think I might have met someone that I really like, only she was a vampire being mind-controlled, and she stabbed and kidnapped me. Plus, I'm having trouble sleeping.”

  
  


Yeah, that was a big old Gordian knot that would blunt even the sharpest of swords.

  
  


But the food was good.

  
  


Afterwards, they walked back to the Soul. Jester, of course, took the lead, bouncing off of brick walls, and trying to sneakily tap Caduceus on the shoulder. He caught her every time.

  
  


Out of the corner of her eye, Beau saw movement. It wasn't much, just a shadow ducking into an alley on the other side of the road. If she hadn't seen that particularly shadow several times before, she wouldn't have paid it any mind.

  
  


'I'm gonna wander for a while,' Beau said aloud, not to any of the group in particular. 'I'll see you guys later?'

  
  


'Do you want company?' Fjord asked. From the looks of things, they had all probably wanted to ask, but he was the first one that got the words out.

  
  


'Nah, just need to clear my head.' It wasn't a lie. Not really. When your head spent ninety percent of the time fuzzy, you always needed to clear it. 'I'll be back before midnight, scout's honor.' She gave a two-fingered salute, and crossed the street before any of them could stop her.

  
  


She did wander, for a little bit. At least until they were all out of sight. It took a while, mostly because Jester and Veth kept stopping and looking over to make sure that Beau was still okay. It was simultaneously endearing and frustrating as hell.

  
  


Once they had finally disappeared from view, Beau ducked down an alleyway. It was very easy to get lost in Zadash, but thankfully, Beau had been very familiar with these streets from an early age. It was the sort of thing that happened when your parents kicked you out, and you had to fend for yourself. She took a few meandering turns before coming out on the alleyway where she had seen the shadow.

  
  


There was nothing.

  
  


There was nothing, and then there was a loud clang of metal that reverberated against the tall buildings on either side. Beau’s head snapped around, and she just barely caught a figure moving into the shadow. A tall figure, with long, dark hair.

  
  


‘Yasha?’ she said, uncertainly.

  
  


There was a long silence. Eventually, though, the figure responded. ‘How do you know my name?’

  
  


Beau didn’t particularly want to mention the dreams that she’d been having. That would have been a bit much. “Hi Yasha, thanks for not killing me, sorry about your dead wife and your best friend.”

  
  


‘I heard it,’ Beau said. ‘While I was…While he…’ She couldn’t finish that sentence. _While I was lying on the cold floo_ _r_ _, bleeding to death at the mercy of your master._

  
  


Yasha seemed to straighten. She stepped out of the shadow, and Beau could see the bags under her mismatched eyes. ‘How long have you been waiting for me?’ Beau asked. She had barely left the Soul in weeks. If Yasha had been hanging around that long…Beau hadn’t realized that she’d made that much of an impression.

  
  


‘Not long.’ Beau didn’t need to be very good with people to know that that was a lie. ‘I…Are you…How are you?’

  
  


‘Better than I was three weeks ago,’ Beau said, brusquely. Yasha flinched. Okay, maybe that had been a bit unfair. She certainly hadn't meant to be that harsh, given what she knew about what had happened.

  
  


‘I am sorry that I hurt you, Beauregard.’ There was something strange in that sentence. Something that Beau couldn’t quite place. Then, it hit her with all the force of a hurricane.

  
  


She had never told Yasha her name.

  
  


That said, though, she _had_ had her ID on her when Obann had taken her. But Beau had a sinking suspicion that Yasha had found out a different way.

  
  


‘How do you know _my_ name?’ she asked, evenly. It was a funny question to ask, given the number of times that they had already hooked up, without ever learning each other’s names. Yasha stared at her, with wide eyes.

  
  


‘I do not know. Before Obann took over me, and again after I killed him, I have had…very strange dreams. Dreams of a past that I do not remember, but it is not my past.’

  
  


Oh. Well that wasn’t great. For some utterly ridiculous reason, Beau had never even considered the fact that the memory transfer might go the other way. Of course it made sense; all the other times it had happened, it had been because someone had drunk her blood.

  
  


‘What did you see?’ Beau’s voice was almost a whisper.

  
  


‘A very large house. A cliff-side made of all different colors. Lots and lots of grapes.’ Yasha looked at Beau, clearly waiting for a response. When none was forthcoming, she continued. ‘A very sad little girl.’

  
  


‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’ Beau slammed back into reality at the sound of a very loud car horn. Yasha jumped. This definitely wasn’t the best place for them to be having an emotionally charged conversation. ‘Do you…this may be a very weird question to ask, but do you want to get a drink?’

  
  


Yasha’s eyes narrowed. She clearly didn’t trust that Beau wasn’t about to turn her into the police. Beau had definitely considered it. But, that wouldn’t achieve anything. Obann was dead now. Molly was dead. There was no-one left that could hurt either of them, except maybe each other. Somehow, that made her feel okay about it all.

  
  


‘You can pick the place, if you want,’ Beau offered. It was a risk, but it was a risk that she wanted – needed – to take. If she could get Yasha unequivocally on her side, then maybe she would feel a little better about everything that had happened.

  
  


‘I only know places that would…not be very safe,’ Yasha said. It wasn’t a no. Beau knew some places nearby – places where people wouldn’t be looking for her – but she wasn’t entirely sure that Yasha would feel safe there. If she thought that Beau might turn her in, then she probably wouldn't feel safe anywhere.

  
  


Honestly, though, the places that Beau was thinking of were shady enough that even Obann would have thought twice about going there. There was another loud noise, and Yasha raised both of her arms in an almost protective sort of way. She was _scared_ of Obann, Beau realized, and wondered why it had taken her so long to figure it out. It was one thing to be cautious of the demon, but this was genuine fear. It didn't matter that he was dead. Didn't matter that Yasha had killed him. That fear didn't just go away.

  
  


Beau reached out a hand, and just barely managed to touch a hand to Yasha’s before Yasha pulled away, like she had been struck by lightning. ‘Why aren’t you afraid of me?’ she whispered. She looked shocked, but there was an undercurrent of something else. Something like…relief, maybe?

  
  


It seemed like an obvious sort of answer. Beau couldn’t remember much from when she’d been with Obann, but she did remember Yasha being told to “take care of her.” She had been so sure that she was going to die, had even sort of made peace with it. The memories after that were a little fuzzier. Being in a bathtub, being gently wrapped in bandages, being taken to the hospital. Beau doubted that she would ever know the full details of what had happened, especially given that Molly was dead, but she did know one thing. ‘You saved my life.’

  
  


‘I…’ Pale, alabaster cheeks had come over in a pink blush. ‘You reminded me of someone that I used to know.’

  
  


‘Zuala?’ Beau asked, before she could stop herself. Yasha froze. Her expression shifted from fear to one of abject sadness.

  
  


‘I am not the only one who had dreams.’ It wasn’t a question. Beau shook her head.

  
  


There was a very, very long pause. ‘I do not remember anything about my life before Obann found me. If you are having dreams of my life, then you already know more about me than I do about myself.’

  
  


This was rapidly becoming a much deeper conversation than could reasonably had in a back alley not even a block from the Cobalt Soul. It was also the sort of conversation that Beau wasn’t sure they could have in a crowded bar. ‘I have an idea,’ she said, after thinking about it for a moment.

  
  


They went to a vamp bar; not one of the ones Beau had been to recently, had been to with Yasha, but one she knew didn’t do any kind of security recording. Not that anyone would have been able to see Yasha in any footage. But, absence of evidence was often just as damning as evidence itself.

  
  


Yasha was clearly very nervous, but really, they weren’t exactly acting suspiciously. Especially given how many times they'd been to one of these places together before. Lots of vampires and lots of humans came to these places looking for a good time. It wasn’t illegal or anything. Just…well, you didn’t tell people you came to these places, was all.

  
  


They didn’t bother with any pretenses, and went straight to the back rooms. ‘Here’s the thing,’ Beau said, once the door was locked. She was so glad that these places had soundproofing. ‘I don’t know what your plans are, but I think we’re both in a bit of a holding pattern, y'know? I just...I have no godsdamned idea what to do with myself anymore, and I get the feeling you're in the same boat.’

  
  


Yasha did not speak straight away. Beau took it as an invitation to continue. ‘My job was to hunt down your boss, and take out your entire den.' Maybe not the whole truth, but enough of the truth that Yasha raised an eyebrow. 'But, you know, I quit my job, so that probably doesn't matter anymore.' She slumped her shoulders.

  
  


Yasha looked at Beau, and Beau stared into those mesmerizing purple and green eyes. 'You quit your job?' Yasha asked. It felt ridiculous to have this kind of conversation with someone who had quite possibly never had a job in her life. Like she was a guidance counselor or something. Beau couldn't help but laugh. The angel looked so godsdamned concerned.

  
  


'I'm sorry about Molly,' Beau said, realizing that she hadn't actually said that yet. 'I know...I mean, you guys were close, right?'

  
  


Yasha's expression shifted quickly from concern, to sadness. 'Ah, yes...he was my friend. Or at least the closest thing to family that I had.' She had a distant sort of look that Beau was very familiar with. It was that ever-present feeling of being lost in a world that seemed to be built for everyone else except you. She fiddled with a chain around her neck – a chain that Beau was pretty sure she had seen Molly wearing.

  
  


Obann had a lot to answer for.

  
  


'So what are you going to do now?' Beau asked. She was only maybe a little bit searching for ideas. Like whatever she could do would be anything like what Yasha was going to do.

  
  


‘I don’t know,’ Yasha said, frowning. Well that made two of them. ‘Obann was not the only problem,’ Yasha said. ‘He…he was subservient even to his master, a much more powerful demon named Tharizdun, who is trapped in the depths of the Abyss. I believe that Obann was preparing the city for Tharizdun’s arrival here.’ Beau had a sudden recollection of the dream she'd had, right before waking from a coma. A dream of Obann, down in the Abyss, explaining that he could not free his master. 'There were times that he was in other places, doing other things. I do not know how much he had accomplished. I think that he has other dens out there, with other vampires.'

  
  


'Oh,' Beau said. She wasn't sure that there was much else to say. That was...that was a pretty big problem.

  
  


After the dream of Obann in the Abyss, Beau had written down everything she could remember, which wasn't really that much. But there had definitely been stuff about Tharizdun in there somewhere.

  
  


That was going so far beyond the scope of what the Cobalt Soul did, though, that she could never accomplish it from within their walls.

  
  


'You know,' she said. 'Kinda feels like maybe we should do something about that.'

  
  


Yasha didn't quite meet her eyes. 'I was thinking that that might be a good place to start.'

  
  


'This might be a stupid question,' Beau said, slowly. 'And feel free to tell me to go jump in a lake, or whatever...' She trailed off, and Yasha gave a startled look. Beau wasn't entirely sure that she understood the metaphor. 'Like, you can say no, I mean. But...can I come with you?'

  
  


Yasha stared at her, incredulous, for the briefest of moments. As though she had been expecting Beau to hit her, or hate her, or something like that. Then, her mouth split into the smallest of smiles. It was one of the nicest things that Beau had seen in a long time. 'Of course,' she said.

  
  


'Alright then.' For the first time in so many months, Beau felt a sense of purpose. She felt a rush of adrenaline surge through her. 'Where do we start?'

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sequel hook!
> 
> Thanks for reading, thanks for all your reviews. I treasure every single one of them. Hope to see you next time.
> 
> The votes are in, and apparently Space!AU is next. Look out for that in maybe a few weeks.

**Author's Note:**

> oh look, a thing.
> 
> If there's one genre I love more than any others, that I haven't really done much of for this fandom, it's Urban Fantasy.
> 
> This will probably be more my standard "2000ish word chapters, much more frequent update schedule." Hopefully, I can juggle two ongoings without going crazy.
> 
> Fic title, and pretty much all chapter titles will be from A Perfect Circle song lyrics. There are some fun metaphors in there.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Big Old Gordian Knot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26348005) by [that_one_kid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/that_one_kid/pseuds/that_one_kid)




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